Eserver

Eserver

The EServer is a digital humanities venture, founded in 1990 and based at Iowa State U, where writers, editors and scholars publish over 35,000 works free of charge.

EServer is a growing online community where hundreds of writers, artists, editors and scholars gather to publish works as open archives, available free of charge to readers.

In today's world of corporate publishing, value is placed on works that sell to broad markets. Quick turnover, high-visibility marketing campaigns for bestsellers, and corporate "superstore" bookstores have all made it difficult for unique and older texts to be published. (Further, the costs this marketing adds to all books discourage people from leisure reading as a common practice.) And publishers tend to encourage authors to write books with strong appeal to the current, undermining (if unknowingly) writings with longer-term implications.

The EServer (founded in 1990 at Carnegie Mellon as the English Server), attempts to provide an alternative niche for quality work, particularly writings in the arts and humanities. Now based at Iowa State University, we offer fifty collections on such diverse topics as art, architecture, race, Internet studies, sexuality, drama, design, multimedia, and current social issues. In addition to short and longer written works, we publish hypertext and streaming audio and video recordings. Our collections grow as increased membership has new works to publish with us, and as we teach new members how to publish works to the Web and to the more than two million readers who visit our site per month. According to Alexa, this makes us the most popular arts and humanities website in the world.