David Seaman has also documented his experience in setting up the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. There are many Internet and WWW sites for quick access to electronic texts. University has e-texts from all over the world listed in alphabetical order by author's name. Some archives have poor quality standards for scanning and proofing their documents, and some texts are marked up using an ad hoc scheme that is only understood by the person who created the text. You take your own chances with these texts.
Some people choose to scan in their texts.
However, much depends on the quality of the original text, i.e, whether the typeface is readable by the scanning software, whether the copy is printed on good quality paper, etc. Often the amount of proofreading and editing involved is much more time-consuming than the user anticipates. Scanning a text brings up questions of copyright and fair use of a text. SGML Software is under review at a number of E-Text Centers. Textual data has been analysed and otherwise manipulated by computer for over thirty years, but until now there has not been any common encoding format for scholarly machine-readable texts.