In 1981, during a trip to Egypt, I bought the old multi-volume Cairo edition of the mother of all Arabic dictionaries: al-Zabidi’s Taj al-‘Arus. It took up an entire suitcase and was so heavy that I paid the porter extra. As I arrived home, the handle broke and the books spilled in the landing of my home. Those were the days when most Arabic books had to be physically bought in the Middle East and carried home in luggage. Books that used to be accessible only in major libraries are often available online today. If one is patient just about any classic Arabic text from the past is available online. Some are pdf scans, where there is a treasure trove at archive.org and 4.shared.com. It is usually best to search these sites in Arabic. But even a ouja-board Google search in Arabic can yield full texts.

Then there are the online sources in which texts have been retyped and thus do not constitute critical editions. I recently came across http://www.islamicbook.ws, which has a large number of early Arabic texts in religion, history and literature, as well as more recent books. The classic histories of Ibn al-Athir and al-Tabari are uploaded. There is even a copy of al-Hamdani’s Iklil (a genealogical text on Yemen) and al-Hur al-‘Ayn of Nashwan ibn Sa’id al-Himyari. Under Adab one can find the Kitab al-Hayawan of al-Jahiz and numerous other texts. Note that these are not critical editions, but at least they make the information available.