The Internet Archive's National Emergency Library

March 26, 2020 2:10 PM

Of the 24.5 million text documents and records stored by the Internet Archive, 1.4 million are only available to borrow, limiting total access to these titles. But two days ago, the Internet Archive announced a National Emergency Library, to serve displaced learners. This suspension will run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. This library brings together all the books from Phillips Academy Andover and Marygrove College, and much of Trent University's collections, along with over a million other books donated from other libraries.
posted by filthy light thief (24 comments total)

Funny that the most viewed book is End of Days, by Sylvia Browne.
posted by BruxoPimba at 2:53 PM on March 26, 2020

Aw, my mom went to Marygrove! I didn't realize they'd donated their library to the Internet Archive--that's about four more centuries modern than I would have expected from them.
posted by praemunire at 2:56 PM on March 26, 2020

There's a lot of good, recent fiction in there.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:26 PM on March 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh yes yes yes, right at the top, "Report of the annual meeting" and the perfect page turner, "textsInfections of the hand; a guide to the surgical treatment of acute and chronic suppurative processes in the fingers, hand, and forearm"

(no idea what meeting for what organization, but at least four years worth!)
posted by sammyo at 3:31 PM on March 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

Mulling over an extension that highlights books in that best of thread (and worst of) and builds an ad hoc link if it's in this library. Or a nice categorized links for us genre obsessed to get a list of science fiction, mysteries or dino porn.
posted by sammyo at 4:08 PM on March 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is one of those moves that seems wonderful, but is actually deeply pernicious and will end up in the courts as soon as the pandemic is over. From book industry newsletter Publishers Lunch (paywalled, excerpting here):

The IA, along with some participating libraries, invented what they call “controlled digital lending” in 2011, and the practice has been controversial among authors and publishers but unchallenged in court up until now. The idea was to digitize in copyright, out of print books from library shelves that are not available as ebooks, and lend them under the same one copy per user at a time principal that has been applied to authorized library lending of ebooks.

There is a whole website devoted to explaining why “controlled digital lending” might be considered Fair Use under copyright law. By their own standards and pledges, making a single digitized print copy available for simultaneous — let alone unlimited — use “would not be considered properly implemented CDL or qualify for” Fair Use under their analysis.

President and ceo of the Association of American Publishers Maria A. Pallante told us in a written statement: “We are stunned by the Internet Archive’s aggressive, unlawful, and opportunistic attack on the rights of authors and publishers in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. As noted here publishers are working tirelessly to support the public with numerous, innovative, and socially-aware programs that address every side of the crisis: providing free global access to research and medical journals that pertain to the virus; offering complementary digital education materials to schools and parents; and expanding powerful storytelling platforms for readers of all ages.

“It is the height of hypocrisy that the Internet Archive is choosing this moment – when lives, livelihoods and the economy are all in jeopardy – to make a cynical play to undermine copyright, and all the scientific, creative and economic opportunity that it supports.”

posted by PhineasGage at 4:19 PM on March 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

Ex-cellent.
posted by darkstar at 4:31 PM on March 26, 2020

As someone who works in the course reserves unit of an academic library, this has been FANTASTIC news. The last two weeks have been insane trying to find digital equivalents of physical textbooks now that spring quarter is completely online. Biggest stumbling blocks were a) no institutional licenses for most major textbook publishers, b) ebook licenses that cost an arm and a leg but only allow one user to access the book at a time, and c) any literature pre-1980 that hasn't been converted to an ebook. Or like, graphic novels!

Anyway, it's been awesome to follow-up with faculty by saying, actually I found five more books on your required list. This is good for stressed out instructors, stressed out students who depend on course reserves, and good for a library that is working remotely while our book kingdom stays dark and closed.
posted by book 'em dano at 6:55 PM on March 26, 2020 [7 favorites]

How is the IA now any different from, say, ZLib?
posted by meehawl at 8:27 PM on March 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Wow, I.rummaged around and found these:

drylongso

Notes thereof

*sigh*
posted by y2karl at 6:06 PM on March 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

"How is the IA now any different from, say, ZLib?"

I think ZLib merely flouts the law. IA is a longstanding non-profit that operates within the law, although they have a history of pushing the boundaries. If you've ever used the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/), that is part of the organization.

Given that libraries are closed and that universities are attempting to conduct classes online, opening up these resources seems essential to allowing the global education system to continue. If students were required to buy each book that they are using in their studies (that they would normally go to a library to check out), studies would be pretty much halted due to affordability.

Oh the irony of the publishing association to have their attack on this practice hidden behind a paywall.

If you want to hear what various publications have to say about this move:

Arstechnica
New Yorker
Vice/Motherboard
The Register
posted by el io at 7:08 PM on March 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Author Chuck Wendig is. not. having it.
posted by Monochrome at 12:03 PM on March 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

The Authors Guild: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

A better thread about the subject than Wendig's, from Alexandra Erin

The Controlled Digital Lending standard that IA conforms to, which dropping the waitlist (temporarily) flouts
posted by Apocryphon at 1:09 PM on March 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

Author's Guild: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

Alexander Chee: As a reminder, there is no author bailout, booksellers bailout, or publisher bailout. The Internet Archive’s “emergency” copyrights grab endangers many already in terrible danger.

Babu Prit (Preeti Chhibber): Love when the piracy argument is
Mid-list (90% of) Authors: please do not pirate my books, you are taking money out of *my* pockets and hurting my chances of getting more work
People pirating: how dare you I deserve this thing it is for me you rich scumbag

I mean, let's be honest here- it's theft. And I've heard all the fucking lame-ass justifications for it. Be honest; just greed and self-centered Ness.
posted by happyroach at 1:32 PM on March 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

I've been looking into the Twitter firestorm and my biased* opinion of what's going on is as follows:

1. Internet Archive takes advantage of the quarantine and rebrands their Open Library as a National Emergency Library, the main change is removing the waitlist, meaning a single digital copy of a work can be borrowed by multiple readers for fourteen days at a time, until the end of June or the end of the emergency. This is ostensibly so people stuck indoors have greater access to reading material.

As aforementioned, this violates the use of the Controlled Digital Lending agreement which states: 'a key principle of CDL is the "owned to loaned" ratio, which means that a library cannot circulate more than the number of copies it owns'. Despite this, IA gains the endorsements of multiple library and academic associations, as well as individuals including Vint Cerf, and promotes this with the fig leaf of "fair use" as their justification.

2. Mainstream news outlets (NPR, The New Yorker, VICE) cover this story and a social media clusterfuck ensues with authors vocally tweeting against IA's actions. Among them are Neil Gaiman, MeFi's own jscalzi, and Chuck Wendig, the latter who is a... polarizing Internet personality. A confused clash breaks out between some IA-critics denouncing the whole place as a "piracy site", while some IA-supporters calling author Seanan McGuire an "ideas landlord".

So right now the narrative is that IA is stealing from authors amidst a pandemic. Some less-informed critics have accused the entire site as existing for IP theft. The defenders maintain that IA exists as a public service.

My take is that there's several misunderstandings going on. Some are accusing IA of illicitly uploading books, when they have numerous partnerships with different libraries (including the California State University system), and are authorized through them. They recognized both by the Library of Congress as a digital preservation partner, and by the state of California as well. What they also have is a piracy problem on their own platform, with people illicitly scanning books or uploading eBooks onto the site. There is an opt-out option for authors, but as with all opt-out options on any platofrm, it is detested and seemingly unreliable.

Furthermore, it seems that they may also have a covert political motive for doing this.**

However, it seems like there's more to this story. There's been a conflict between publishers and libraries for a few years now over how eBooks should be distributed and priced. CDL is a white paper and not yet enshrined into law; the Authors Guild has been critical of it already, and the National Writers Union has a lengthy FAQ attacking the doctrine. The Association of American Publishers has called it flawed. This conflict rests upon a massive rickety Rube Goldberg device of copyright law (much of it not yet updated for our digital present) and grey areas. This whole issue also comes at the heels of the Macmillan boycott (previously).

So yeah, this act is happening within a greater context that has yet to be shaken out via dramatic court cases. The question of what can be done with the publishing industry, and how to create a better IP system to protect the creators' livelihoods, has yet to be deliberated, much less answered.

*I'm generally on IA's side. I feel they made a mistake, and may be on an overzealous digital civil liberties crusade (see below). I'm also not sure if IA is worthy of this much blame, because in terms of actual money being lost, I doubt if IA possesses the number of titles, or there's even public awareness in IA (despite the news articles promoting them- and this resulting Streisand effect-generating backlash) to lead to masses of readers reading through them, instead of via their public library's eBook collection, or via online retailers who are far more popular and visible.

I also wonder if, as in the eBook 'War" WGBH article above, the real villain- and winner- of this internecine struggle between infosocialists and knowledge workers is Amazon. While this controversy over unlimited lending (lasting until the end of June, or whenever the emergency ends, or when IA likely recants and backs off from this policy change) breaks out, I suspect that online retailers of secondhand books- chiefly Amazon who has specifically acted badly in this market- are likely making far more money of which creators will never see a cent in royalties for. My bet is that there's far more money to be lost from Big Used Book rather than a nonprofit's incomplete crowdsourced library. Not to mention, traditional sources of eBook piracy. As the Ars article linked above states, "the Open Library's customer base is still fairly small, so the practical financial impact for publishers and authors is likely to be small, too."

**This interesting thread from an author suggests that IA might be doing this deliberately (quoted in part, please read it in full):

Unpopular opinion: authors freaking the fuck out about the Internet Archive providing logistics for local libraries proves why it was a dumbfuck idea for libraries not to fight for the first-sale doctrine for ebooks unto scorched earth and beyond from moment one

The Internet Archive has made the calculation that this is an excellent chance to challenge the patchwork compromises that have only held together because local libraries didn't have the resources to fight them. [...]

This is a specific test case being put to the public in order to challenge the doctrine of first sale as applied to ebooks, and it's in direct response to the exorbitant prices and significant restrictions publishers place on libraries. [...] It is a test case to stop Macmillan from continuing to gouge your library for the licensing system they made up.

Fucked up on principle for IA to do something that could potentially hurt the sales of authors during this time, but this might be the method behind the madness.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:28 PM on March 29, 2020 [5 favorites]

Internet Archive responds to criticism
posted by book 'em dano at 5:23 PM on March 30, 2020 [2 favorites]

While I appreciate the insights, research, and depth in Apocryphon's comment above, regardless of any possible "long game" the Internet Archive might be considering, the facts in this current situation are clear and simple. The Archive is distributing multiple, simultaneous, unlicensed digital copies of copyrighted books. That's indisputably illegal, even if it weren't depriving publishers and authors of rightful income, the same as if they were xeroxing copies of a print book to hand out for free.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:34 AM on March 31, 2020

The Copyright Clearance Center, which coordinates copyrights for those who cares to secure the legal permission when needed, has in fact organized scores of publishers who are willing to waive copyright restrictions to ensure that students and teachers have access to books while sheltering:

https://www.copyright.com/pardot-landing-page/education-continuity-license
posted by Jesse the K at 1:18 PM on March 31, 2020 [2 favorites]

book 'em dano: Internet Archive responds to criticism

[The closure of public libraries] is a tremendous and historic outage. According to IMLS FY17 Public Libraries survey (the last fiscal year for which data is publicly available), in FY17 there were more than 716 million physical books in US public libraries. Using the same data, which shows a 2-3% decline in collection holdings per year, we can estimate that public libraries have approximately 650 million books on their shelves in 2020. Right now, today, there are 650 million books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access that are sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them. And that’s just in public libraries.

Emphasis mine. The Internet Archive is responding to, as they put it, a historic outage by making a fraction of that library more widely available. Seems pretty reasonable to me, given that these are titles that can't be downloaded, and are only available if you log in. Sure, you could screencap the books and distribute them that way, but you could do the same thing with any other e-lending platform.

It would be amazing if they could extend their Controlled Digital Lending to directly reflect the scale of the public outage, making that many titles available to digitally borrow, but because there is no national registry of public library books (because otherwise they wouldn't have to estimate the total collection in public libraries), this seems like an appropriate response.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:03 PM on March 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

The Authors Guild has posted a template takedown notice for authors to tell the Internet Archive to cut it out.
posted by PhineasGage at 8:33 AM on April 1, 2020

Project Disco (from the Computer and Communications Industry Association tech lobbying group): Why a National Emergency Library Would Have Been Unnecessary

The amended agreement would have established a Book Rights Registry (“BRR”) that would have had the authority to collectively manage the U.S. copyrights of all books published in the United States, the U.K., Canada, or Australia before 2009. The BRR would have licensed to Google the right to offer three services relating to these books. First, under the Preview service, Google would have been able to display to a user up to 20% of an out-of-print book’s text in response to a search query, but none of the text of an in-print book. Second, Google would have been able to sell a consumer perpetual digital access to a title. Third, and most relevant here, Google could have sold institutional subscriptions to public libraries and higher education institutions. The institutional subscription database would have included the full text of all of the out-of-print books Google had digitized.

Google would have set the prices it charged for these services, within parameters established by the settlement. Google would have provided 63% of the revenue it collected to the BRR, which in turn would have distributed it to authors and publishers.

The institutional subscription would have provided a framework for libraries to enable their users to access books during an emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The institutional subscription database would have contained far more titles than are in the NEL. Further, the settlement would have allowed the BRR to authorize Google to permit remote access to public library users (remote access was already permitted to higher education institutional subscribers). Significantly, the settlement would have provided the institutions, Google, and the BRR with the flexibility to make other adjustments to respond to the pandemic, such as the pricing of the subscription and the titles included in the institutional subscription database.

posted by Apocryphon at 10:40 AM on April 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

Rivers Solomon, author of An Unkindness of Ghosts and The Deep:

While I profoundly appreciate people buying my books - it's literally why I'm alive - I am happy that my work is very likely available on pirating websites. Individuals accessing my work for free is not what hurts me as an artist. Capitalism does that just fine all by itself. [...]

In the same way that I do not believe pharmaceutical companies should hold hostage life-saving medications nor landowners food, I do not believe my creative output should be withheld from general access.

Either my work as an artist is important, good, valuable, and meaningful -- and therefore should be available freely to all who wish to access it-- or it's nothing. [...]

Even the most basic of liberal reforms -- affordable educatoin & housing, universal basic income, universal healthcare -- would provide greater improvement to artist's lives than targeting piraters.

I'd like to clear up one thing. Readers don't pay authors. Publishers do. While they may use sales-figures to justify decisions, consider that in the Big 5 it's not unusual for a small number of writers to receive million-dollar+ advances for...debuts.

I haven't used the NEL yet, and the books I've checked out from the Internet Archive have all been dusty dry academic tomes out of print. But I do thank them for this controversy, because it's led me to discover this Afrofuturist author and now I can't wait for her book to arrive in the mail!
posted by Apocryphon at 2:02 PM on April 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

I am just now reading Hathi Trust's COVID-19 response from March 31, 2020, which is less drastic (or bold) than Internet Archive's action:

Today HathiTrust makes available to our members the Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS), which will allow students, faculty, and staff from eligible member libraries to have online reading access to materials that are currently unavailable to them in their library collections. All users continue to have access to more than 6.7 million public domain and Creative Commons-licensed works. By offering this service, we intend to help continue to support teaching and research at institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ETAS is available by request to all HathiTrust member libraries located in the U.S. that have experienced an unexpected or involuntary, temporary disruption to normal operations, requiring the library to be closed to the public, or otherwise to have restricted print collection access services. HathiTrust uses a request process to verify that the library meets these qualifications and to record information about the expected duration of need.

We have developed a careful and measured approach to this service, conforming to fair use under U.S. copyright law, in order to help students, teachers, and researchers continue to do their vital work.

Increased access for students, faculty, and staff of eligible member libraries seems like a reasonable tactic.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:34 AM on April 21, 2020

Unilaterally, extra-legally declaring things "emergency" is the refuge of scoundrels...
posted by PhineasGage at 1:04 PM on April 21, 2020