The quality of Poe e-texts is uneven. Many older texts were casually
produced by scanning for massive CD-ROM anthologies,
using whatever edition or editions came to hand. At that time the printed
sources of e-texts were not carefully selected (some still remain unknown), and
it was not standard practice to paginate the text, disclose the source, or verify the
electronic result against a standard printed text.
This older Poe material on the Web is quite suitable for general or
undergraduate use --
but great care must be taken in critical or graduate research
requiring verified e-texts exactly matched
to standard printed editions.
Since early Poe e-texts had no pagination, it was often expedient
to paginate them according to the Harrison edition,
out-of-copyright but still useful.
Although the page and pagragraph breaks matched
the Harrison edition, at times the text did not.
Happily this picture is now changing as recent digital preservation and access
projects produce better edited and more carefuly verified electronic
versions of historical Poe editions, such as those in the Poe Society
of Baltimore,
The American Verse Collection at the University of Michigan,
A Digitized Library of Southern Literature at
the University of North Carolina,
the Making of America project at the University
of Michigan, the Early American
Fiction project at the University of Virginia in collaboration with Chadwyck-Healey. Nevertheless, for the most critical textual applications,
the absolute, detailed fidelity of these texts to the printed originals
cannot be taken for granted.