
Better World Books and the Internet Archive Unite to Preserve Millions of Books - l1n
https://against-the-grain.com/2019/11/atg-newsflash-for-the-love-of-literacy-better-world-books-and-the-internet-archive-unite-to-preserve-millions-of-books/
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mindcrime
Hmm... so, at first blush at least, this sounds like a pretty Big Deal, and a
Good Thing. From the press release:

 _Better World Books, the world’s leading socially conscious online
bookseller, is now owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, not-
for-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner the Internet
Archive. This groundbreaking partnership will allow both organizations to
pursue their collective mission of making knowledge universally accessible to
readers everywhere. This new relationship will provide additional resources
and newfound synergies backed by a shared enthusiasm for advancing global
literacy. Together, the two organizations are expanding the digital frontier
of book preservation to ensure books are accessible to all for generations to
come._

 _This new relationship will allow Better World Books to provide a steady
stream of books to be digitized by the Internet Archive, thereby growing its
digital holdings to millions of books. Libraries that work alongside Better
World Books will now make a bigger impact than ever. Any book that does not
yet exist in digital form will go into a pipeline for future digitization,
preservation and access._

Sounds good to me. Of course, there's a big difference between issuing a press
release and actually doing something. It'll be interesting to see how this
plays out in reality.

~~~
jjeaff
Better World Books has in my experience been purposefully misleading about the
structure and purpose of their business. They put book donation boxes
everywhere that are covered in "save the children" style graphics and
messages.

But the reality is, they are a for profit company that very much enriched the
owners while donating a very small percentage to charity. And it's one thing
to have a corporation that does social good. But their entire business is
based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to
charity. They also make deals with public libraries to sell their books online
and take a big cut.

Which makes me suspicious of this new arrangement. So it is now a for profit
corporation owned by a non-profit?

Did the owners decide to reorganize or donate the whole business or something?

~~~
sedachv
BWB is also the only online bookseller that seems incapable of delivering
their orders consistently. I have given up trying to order from them.

~~~
sitkack
You should try Thrift Books they also offer inconsistency as a service.

~~~
phy6
Ebay is where I get my out of circulation library books for really cheap. I
just picked up a never loaned "Toward Artificial Sapience : Principles and
Methods for Wise Systems" for $3.73. On Thriftbooks it's $156. Looking back,
the seller was "BetterWorldBooks"!

------
dublinben
Original source on the Internet Archive blog:
[https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-
literacy...](https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy-
better-world-books-and-the-internet-archive-unite-to-preserve-millions-of-
books/)

------
vallismortis
I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder
how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that
have historical value and never should have left the Smithsonian.

~~~
jrochkind1
Were they literally from the Smithsonian?

Either way, libraries/librarians deaccession books all the time that outsiders
might think "that's so valuable, why'd you get rid of it?"

There is only so much budget/space to store stuff. You get rid of stuff that
is no longer relevant to your mission, or lots of other libraries have so you
don't need one too, or just isn't _as_ important to your users/mission as
other stuff. No library has infinite space.

~~~
cestith
You also reclaim space if you have multiple copies of a work and the demand
for the title in your collection is limited. So even if you've received a copy
that was formerly from some library they may have kept a copy or two if they
used to have a dozen in circulation.

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FillardMillmore
> Now libraries who deaccession to BWB can have even greater social impact,
> because the Internet Archive will acquire, digitize, lend, store and
> digitally preserve millions of books from BWB’s inventory over the next few
> years

Perhaps this is an obvious question with an obvious answer but how will this
work in relation to copyrights? I know that many copyrights expire and
sometimes the copyrights are forfeited and as a result many creative works
from long ago end up in the public domain.

But what is the plan here to achieve this mission while respecting copyrights?

~~~
jamesgeck0
They appear to be treating this like a digital library. From the Wired
article[1]:

> you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited
> work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a
> digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two
> weeks—much the same way you'd borrow a book from your local library.

The two page preview should be defensible as fair use; this is less than what
Google's archived books allow you to view, for example.

The legal details of the borrowing process are further documented here[2]:

> We have recently made available a small number of books (currently 61 books)
> published between 1923 and 1941 under a provision of US Copyright law that
> was written to permit libraries to copy and lend titles that are no longer
> subject to commercial exploitation, and selection is currently overseen by
> lawyers expert in US copyright law.[3]

It sounds like as long as a book in the last twenty years of copyright and is
out of print, it might well be fair game for archival and lending. I'm not
sure about books more recent than that.

1\. [https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-
more-...](https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-more-
reliable/)

2\. [https://blog.archive.org/2018/01/24/digital-books-on-
archive...](https://blog.archive.org/2018/01/24/digital-books-on-archive-org/)

3\.
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3049158](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3049158)

~~~
jrochkind1
I think you have found a lot of the relevant law.

The relevant laws are definitely not _entirely_ clearcut. Especially in how it
applies to making a digital copy like this. Which means they aren't entirely
clearcut _against_ them either. But someone could certainly try suing them.
Apparently IA is willing to be a bit risk forward here.

But if they're only doing out of print books, there's less likely to be
someone who _wants_ to sue them (a lot of old out of print books are basically
"orphaned", there is no identifiable copyright owner, which is what a lot of
the relevant laws are targetted at), and if someone did want to sue them,
they'd have less chance of winning for an out of print book. (It's not
entirely clear to me they're only doing out of print books?)

Don't forget that Google's ability to scan and offer previews of books as
'fair use' was the subject of a multi-year lawsuit too! Which ended in a
settlement, not a court ruling...

------
macawfish
These days, my mind immediately jumps to "what if you plugged all those books
into GPT-2!?"

~~~
mekarpeles
mek here from Internet Archive's openlibrary.org project. We've been in broad
talks w/ folks like OpenAI about how the contents of texts may be used to
power better discovery and to increase usefulness of books. Open Library is
pretty far from GPT-2, but we do have fulltext search across ~3.5M books:
[http://openlibrary.org/search/inside](http://openlibrary.org/search/inside)

We're also an open source project
[[https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary](https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary)]
and happy to collaborate w/ folks on such projects. I'm personally very
inspired by the [https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-
booklamp/](https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/25/apple-booklamp/) Booklamp
project; building a genome for every book and surfacing as much content as we
can to help patrons discover citations, quotes, and other useful content which
would inform their reading choices and otherwise be completely inaccessible
behind a borrow.

If anyone is interested in helping us move the needle on such an effort,
please do get in touch and we'd be glad to invite you to Open Library's slack
channel.

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cable2600
How is this different from this project?
[https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/)

It seems books that are so old they enter the public domain end up at
Gutenberg in eBook format.

I had a friend of mine, Mike Crawford, who died. He refused to put his works
in a book and put it up on websites. Well nobody can maintain his website but
if he did a book and submitted it to Gutenberg under creative commons his work
would live on past him. Many books are on websites for free with advertising
or donations to keep them running.

~~~
zozbot234
(1) Project Gutenberg offers _fully transcribed_ books (not just OCR) that are
also reformatted to be readable in the browser (or as EPUB's). The Internet
Archive just stops at the scanning stage and provides page images.

(2) The Internet Archive apparently has some arrangement to "lend" books that
are still under copyright, and most (if not all) of the books that BWB
supplies to them are going to fall under that. But they do have a lot of stuff
that's totally out of copyright too, with no such restriction. Even PG (as
well as its sister site, Distributed Proofreaders) takes a lot of their
"source" material from the IA.

------
classified
Any alternative to Google's land grab of intellectual rights to the books they
digitize (in a horrible quality to boot) can only be a good thing.

~~~
zozbot234
Doesn't Google Books push a lot of their PD content to the Internet Archive
themselves? That doesn't seem like an undue "land grab", it seems like they're
being good net citizens for once.

