Thanks RWood.. I was wondering the same thing. There is at least a large overlap.
I'm also curious about the payment system. I tried to pay a larger amount, but the payment defaulted to $1. Then I figured I'd send a message with the button to let the buyer know you paid, but all it did was autosend the web site, payment and my name. Not exactly what I meant to do. I'll send an email to the contact at Bartleby and see if we can send more than a dollar. I think many people might want to do that pending the comparison to Gutenberg.
All in all, it's great to see what Bartleby is doing. I hope they make money on it, and I hope people like me learn about Bartleby that weren't very aware of them before. But mostly I'm thrilled that someone there is obviously putting all this material up there as a goodwill gesture with the public's interests at heart (as they have done for quite a while in HTML form). Kudos to the Bartleby folks!
And thanks to VillageReader for noticing the ebook page. I was not aware that they had started supplying ebook formats!
BTW, has anyone checked to see if it's the full shelf of fiction, or just a portion? Also, do they have the main Harvard Classics collection available in e-book form?
I have the paper version, and I'm really hoping to be able to get rid of it because it takes up a lot of space!
Update1: You can see the full list here and it sure looks like this is the full shelf of fiction! I hope they add the main Harvard Classics collection also!
Update2: I did shoot off a bunch of questions about it to the Bartleby contact. I'll share whatever they choose to share with me.