
National Emergency Library - mauliknshah
https://archive.org/details/nationalemergencylibrary
======
geofft
The blog post has a bit more information about what's going on:
[http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-
eme...](http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-
library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/)

These are scans that the Internet Archive already had that they had been
making available through libraries on a check-out basis, which apparently is
fine under fair use. Their claim now is, because of the national emergency,
it's fair use to make these scans directly available to everyone.

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ffmike
As an author with half a dozen or so titles in this archive, I'm happy to see
this. It's not like I was making any money from books published a decade or
more ago.

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supernova87a
While I'm sure it's a wonderful resource, those cover scans as the thumbnails
are generally useless (wall full of blank colored tiles?), and many of the
titles are so uninformative and badly organized you almost have to know what
you want to search productively -- it's not like you're going to randomly
stumble across something interesting in a sea of 1M titles.

Seems like it needs some volunteer contribution to do some curation / tagging
/ rating to get people to be able to use it successfully...

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8bitsrule
Their search engine is quite good. The IA is always asking for volunteers.
Maybe you've got some time off?

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EamonnMR
On the one hand, I love the IA and really hate to see them burn Bridges/risk
getting shut down.

On the other hand, this crisis is going to require bold action and moving
faster than the speed of money and negotiation. I was hoping to see 'screw it,
everything is free' from hospitals or someone knocking off ventilator designs
but hey, this is a start.

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Rebelgecko
Does anyone know how they're legally able to do this, when publishers make my
local library buy a license for every concurrent copy of an ebook that someone
checks out?

~~~
leephillips
They are not. They are violating copyright law, and stealing from writers and
publishers. Twitter is full of complaints by writers who discovered their
illegally scanned books here, pointing out that this will make it harder for
them to eat and pay rent during the isolation period.

~~~
8bitsrule
In my whole life, I've never heard of a significant author who complained
about one of their books being in a library, or about library patrons as
'thieves'.

IA has deals with countless libraries, and since the libraries are closed, and
the online schools are open, I very much doubt that IA will keep up with the
temporary loss of the libraries or the needs of schools.

"Public support for this emergency measure has come from over 100 individuals,
libraries and universities across the world"

~~~
leephillips
This is not a complaint about libraries or library patrons. I love and use
libraries. Authors love to see their books in libraries, including their
ebooks. The details matter. Scanning a book and putting it on the internet
without the right to do so is not what a library does.

~~~
dorchadas
I think there might be some misunderstanding. There was a good comment on
Reddit [1] about how all this was legal. From what I gathered, libraries
scanned books that didn't have digital copies already made, and offered them
to patrons to "check out". They used software to make sure that they only
checked out a total combined digital/print number equal to the number of print
copies they had bought, with software to make sure they couldn't be copied.
That seems fair, to me (and is, apparently, legal). The National Emergency
Library basically opens that up to anyone now, however, with no limits on how
many times a book can be checked out at once.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/fpsqm0/the_internet_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/fpsqm0/the_internet_archive_in_san_francisco_announced/flnsiq1/)

~~~
leephillips
I don't think there is a misunderstanding. In fact, your informative comment
explains the crucial difference between what a legitimate, copyright-
respecting library does and what the "Emergency Library" is doing. This is, in
fact, why authors, who never complained about real libraries, are complaining
about this.

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8bitsrule
If you go to the site and click the 'Views' sort-by, you'll see the most
popular titles. For some reason, #1 at the moment, by a factor of 3, is Sylvia
Brown's 2008 _End of Days_. Go figure. Brown was 'a medium with psychic
abilities.'

Yep, that's where we're at. Viewed 20 times more than 'You Can Negotiate
Anything'.

~~~
dannyw
The specific quote from the book:

"In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the
globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known
treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that
it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years
later, and then disappear completely."

I think it's complete bullshit, but also no surprise why it is so popular.

~~~
Kye
Make enough predictions and one is bound to land. It's not even the first
coronavirus outbreak "around 2020."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Outbreaks_of_coron...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Outbreaks_of_coronavirus-
related_diseases)

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userbinator
Even without this, the archive.org has lots of interesting books to read,
games to play[1], etc; but with all the quarantining and such, I suspect
people will just use it far more often.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games](https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games)

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ewams
"log in and this book can be borrowed for 14 days"

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aiscapehumanity
They can be re-borrowed instantly though.

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Karunamon
Not much help in an emergency, though.

~~~
roywiggins
The emergency it's meant to cover is the fact that all the actual libraries
are closed, not to replace owning books.

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justinclift
Signing up doesn't seem to work.

Filled out the captcha, and the "Sign Up" button is just spinning forever.
It's been a few minutes.

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sudhirj
Sorry to keep plugging this, but I think it’s much more important to take good
books and lay them out well for reading on all screen sizes, make them
accessible, give people good fonts etc. Trying to do that on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710232)

