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Mark Twain, who chronicled America’s Gilded Age in the 19th century, joined the digital age this month when UC Berkeley researchers put 700 of his letters online. 

The university’s Mark Twain Project placed five volumes of the author’s letters, covering the years 1876 to 1880, on the Palo Alto-based ebrary, Inc. web site on Aug. 4. The letters are available in a page-by-page, printable format at www.discover.ebrary.com and will appear separately as a full-fledged e-book on Amazon.com in the coming weeks. 

“Moving into the electronic arena is a big, big step for us,” said Anh Bui, associate editor with the Mark Twain Project. 

The author’s letters, housed at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, include about 11,000 written by Twain and his immediate family and 17,000 written to them. 

The project has already published six printed volumes of Twain’s letters along with lengthy explanatory notes. The latest, “Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 6,” was published in November.  

The print volumes cover the years 1853 to 1875, and the online letters will pick up where the more traditional books left off—in 1876.  

The speedy move to put the latest batch of letters online means that readers will not have the benefit of the historical notes included in the old print volumes. UC Berkeley researchers say they have some concerns about the public deciphering the letters without annotation. But, in the end, they said, students of the “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” author will benefit from easy access to the new letters long before they can be published in book form. 

“It doesn’t have any of the editorial bells and whistles that the print versions do, so it’s not ideal,” said Bui. “But you don’t need to wait years to see the latest letters.” 

The foray into e-books is the first of several digital projects planned by the Mark Twain Project. This fall, the group is set to join with the University of California Press and the California Digital Library to announce a collaborative effort making a host of Twain resources available online. The project will include private and public writings by Twain and supplementary material about his era, according to a UC Berkeley statement. 

UC Berkeley’s Mark Twain Papers includes the world’s largest collection of Twain’s letters, notebooks, manuscripts, documents and scrapbooks, along with 150 books from his personal library. 

Viewing “Mark Twain’s Letters 1876-1880: An Electronic Edition” through ebrary, Inc.’s web site is free for account holders but will cost 25 cents per page to print. The e-book will go for $9.95.