Bartleby.com is an American electronic text archive, headquartered in Los Angeles (USA) and named for Herman Melville's story "Bartleby, the Scrivener". It is a commercial website operated by Barnes & Noble Education, though its repository of texts can still be accessed. The repository has four main categories: reference, verse, fiction, and nonfiction.
History
It was initiated with the name "Project Bartleby" in January 1993 as a collection of classic literature as part of the website of Columbia University. In February 1994, they published the first classic book in HTML code format, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
Barnes & Noble Education (BNED) is an independent, public company that began trading using the New York Stock Exchange on August 3, 2015. In 2016 it acquired Student Brands, an education technology company which was then operating Bartleby.com as a digital study website. In 2017, BNED announced the start of an on-line commercial study aid system, named "bartleby", as part of the Company’s reporting segment Digital Student Solutions (DSS). Due to the site’s ability to gain user acquisition by SEO, Bartleby.com was chosen to serve as the basis of a new set of products and services emphasizing improving student success and outcomes.
Student cheating
Bartleby's system Learn provides a question-and-answer service similar to that of Chegg. Students have been using this to "contract cheat". Some universities therefore explicitly forbid students from using Bartleby's Q&A service for contract cheating.