The Swedish Literature Bank is a non-profit organisation whose objective is making classic Swedish literature and literary criticism freely available in digital editions.
The Swedish Literature Bank publishes Swedish literary classics from the Middle Ages on, including "minor classics" and major historical and religious works,[1] in four digital formats: searchable e-text, facsimiles of the original edition, PDF files and EPUB files.
The initiative began after a suggestion by Sven Lindqvist in the early 2000s.
[2] The Swedish Academy held a seminar exploring the idea in 2002, and in 2004 a two-year pilot project began with funding from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
[3] Starting at a time of rapid expansion of Swedish higher education institutions, the project was designed to address the problem of the many new Swedish colleges needing to set up libraries with expensive older literature, and to make older Swedish literature freely available anywhere in the world.