A History of the Later Roman Empire: Begging to be studied in E

Being back at university again has made me start really looking at academic books. Every university has them—rows and rows stretching over floors of valuable real estate. Will we ever see them all digitized and put into some easily searchable format?

I decided to find a book that cries out for some more imaginative formatting, and there was an obvious candidate from John Bagnell Bury (photo)—A History of the Later Roman Empire. Yes, I located it on paper.

History is comprehensive to the point of being daunting, covering every aspect of the Byzantine empire (and I’ll ignore Mr. Bury’s comments about calling it “Byzantine”).

E-indexes vs. P ones

A paper edition of History runs into two volumes; and for the serious student of ancient and mediaeval history or church history, this is a very important publication.  But it also points out the horrors of trying to research a subject using the old p-book index.  Students are struggling to finish the amount of work as it is, so who needs to waste an hour trying to locate references in a book? Luckily, via David, I’ve since found that History is indeed online, from McMaster University (vol. 1 and vol. 2 in PDF) and a University of Chicago-related site (HTML pages). 

Being able to search the text is one thing, but to be able to hyperlink references, add notes, bookmark sections—now that could be a real time-saver with the right software in use.  And no more of those dog-eared volumes with broken spines and lots of underlining (usually by someone who liked red pens)!