Commercial publishers have also included Jonson's works in large text- and image-based literary databases. University Microfilms (UMI) first began microfilming books in 1938 as part of its Early English Books series, and in the mid-1990s digitized its microfilm catalogue to create Early English Books Online (EEBO). For a number of years UMI had also issued textual databases of digitized print resources in CD-ROM form under the subsidiary imprint ProQuest; in 1995 they expanded the ProQuest distribution to the rapidly expanding realm of on-line publishing via the Internet. Four years later they purchased Chadwyck-Healey, which had been producing large literary databases encompassing a wide variety of genres (poetry, drama, prose, bibles, criticism, and journalism) and languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Latin). The resulting corporation, now called ProQuest Information and Learning (http://il.proquest.com), offers three digital resources containing Jonson's works: EEBO, digitized images of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century editions from the original UMI microfilms; Literature Online (LION); transcribed and XML-encoded texts of early print witnesses from the original Chadwyck-Healey sources; and Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP, http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp), an ongoing collaboration between ProQuest, the Universities of Michigan and Oxford, and the Council on Library and Information Resources, to generate newly transcribed and more deeply encoded electronic texts to accompany roughly one quarter of the EEBO holdings.

In the 400 years since Ben Jonson first appeared in print, the processes for creating textual and illustrative images on physical surfaces have proliferated (scribal, relief, intaglio, planographic, digital), as have the editorial rationales employed by the men and women shaping each work for their readers. As they arranged for the printing and publication of the Every Man plays, neither Walter Burre nor William Holme could have conceived the myriad forms these and subsequent Jonsonian creations would take over the centuries. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the large team that has produced the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson likewise has no way of predicting the future manifestations of the writings they have bound within these volumes. What does appear certain is that interest in Jonson and his contemporaries among students, scholars, and readers will continue well into the future.