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Internet Archive offers 1.4 million copyrighted books for free online
One of the casualties of coronavirus-related social distancing measures has been public libraries, which are shut down in many communities around the world. This week, the Internet Archive, an online library best known for running the Internet's Wayback Machine, announced a new initiative to expand access to digital books during the pandemic.
For almost a decade, an Internet Archive program called the Open Library has offered people the ability to "check out" digital scans of physical books held in storage by the Internet Archive. Readers can view a scanned book in a browser or download it to an e-reader. Users can only check out a limited number of books at once and are required to "return" them after a limited period of time.
Until this week, the Open Library only allowed people to "check out" as many copies as the library owned. If you wanted to read a book but all copies were already checked out by other patrons, you had to join a waiting list for that bookâjust like you would at a physical library.
Of course, such restrictions are artificial when you're distributing digital files. Earlier this week, with libraries closing around the world, the Internet Archive announced a major change: it is temporarily getting rid of these waiting lists.
"The Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation's displaced learners," the Internet Archive wrote in a Tuesday post. "This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheReaperD on Sunday March 29 2020, @07:56AM (3 children)
The copyright cartels could waive the restrictions and allow the books to be distributed freely. Even if the offer was only available and expired after a limited time. They could help a lot of people and it would cost them very little. But, of course, they care more about their precious copyrights than they do about people.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @08:23AM (1 child)
Copyright is an anachronism for any passive consumer of content. You can find everything you want for the cost of a few electrons, and downloading it is like a bear shitting in the woods.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:53PM
> You can find everything you want ...
Actually, there is a lot of written material that is not available online, including trade secrets that have nothing to do with copyright. All sorts of specialized things have not been digitized. Our company library is full of interesting and potentially useful reports done for engineering customers (still owned by the customer). Last week someone asked me for details on a research project done in the 1950s and I pointed them to the material that had been made public (in a book, no eBook available).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @03:05PM
But, of course, they care more about their precious profits than they do about people.
There FTFU.
To the copyright mafia's, copyright is a means to an end, that end is profits. What they care about is maintaining profits. Copyright is one way, but if it were unavailable to them, they would try many other ways to maintain profits.