[MR] searching for databases of early books online

[Greg Lindahl]

> However I'm looking for an online source for databases
> of early books.

There aren't any good ones. The usual databases like "The Online Books
Page" and the Internet Public Library don't have a way to search by date.

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
http://www.ipl.org/

There is a collection called Renascence Editions, most of which is
pre-1600:

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm

But it's just that one guy's effort.

It's kind of annoying to book digitizers as well as potential readers;
I have editions of stuff related to the US Library of Congress online
dance collection, for example, but anyone looking at the LoC site
isn't going to discover that there are related works elsewhere without
quite a bit of work.

-- Gregory Blount, sometimes publisher