
A National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books - smacktoward
http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/
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tkgally
The comments posted so far seem to miss both the ambition and innovation of
the Internet Archive's efforts in recent years and the boldness of their new
initiative. They developed a way to make in-copyright books available for free
to anyone who wants to read them online: by keeping a physical copy of each
book they scan, they can justify "lending" it to one person at a time online
for a limited period. Their collection of scanned in-copyright books has been
growing rapidly. Try searching at the Open Library for some popular book you
enjoyed reading when you were younger—mystery, Western, young adult, science
fiction—and they're likely to have a copy that you can "check out" and read in
your browser. You even get to enjoy the yellowing of old paperback pages
without the stench of the decaying paper.

The new initiative is bold both because it meets an urgent, unprecedented
need—providing books to millions of people who are locked down and cannot go
to libraries—and because it seems to be taking significant legal risks for the
greater good. The announcement at archive.org links to a document [1] that in
turn links to some attempts at legal justifications for the move. I'll let
others weigh the merits of those arguments. I suspect, though, that if major
publishers and other deep-pocketed copyright holders tried to contest it the
Archive would have a difficult case on its hands.

[1]
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkl3RX4CzpRTQsoG1tsdHC0f...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkl3RX4CzpRTQsoG1tsdHC0foYiU7A8U_Vt1UyVboP8/edit)

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selfishgene
Chris Bourg, Director of MIT Libraries, has a lot of nerve to make this
statement in the article:

 _“Ubiquitous access to open digital content has long been an important goal
for MIT and MIT Libraries. Learning and research depend on it.”_

Maybe Bourg should recall back in 2012 how his library aided and abetted the
Secret Service's plan to have Aaron Swartz inappropriately charged under the
federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

As many readers of hacker news will recall, rather than serve time in a
federal penitentiary for his brave act of civil disobedience, Swartz sadly
chose in January 2013 to take his own life instead.

Swartz then became a martyr for the cause of "ubiquitous open access to
digital content" ... rather than just "ubiquitous access to [already] open
digital content." As a result, he would have been a much better spokesperson
for the cause of "ubiquitous access" than a phony like Chris Bourg.

Swartz is today rightly regarded as one of the heroes of the 21st century
civil rights movement. Bourg, on the other hand, is just another overpaid
university administrator who collects a large (and largely undeserved) salary
that has helped put millions of American college students into several
trillion dollars worth of student debt ... which several presidential
candidates now want taxpayers to bail out!

Bourg should also check in with MIT police to find out how often they are
called into the library (post Swartz' arrest) to threaten members of the
general public with arrest for the crime of using his library computer
terminals "for more than hour."

Thankfully, those of us who are not on the academic dole now have libgen and
scihub for our "learning and research."

@Chris Bourg: Continue to enjoy collecting your university fat-cat salary
until more students wake up and realize they don't need go into debt to feed
your sorry freeloading ass anymore :)

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gowld
I'm curious if you give away more free access to books and computers than MIT
does.

JSTOR licensed content isn't legally MIT's to give away.

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sturza
This may be a stupid question: how do you borrow a digital book? And why is it
called borrowing? Can't you just make infinite copies?

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catalogia
Basically it's DRM used to avoid offending the book publishing industry. I
recommend checking Library Genesis first.

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sturza
I understood. So it's basically getting a book with some code that will
invalidate the content after x days. Another probably stupid question: can an
infinite number of people borrow the same book? Or do they have a limited
number of "copies" to give out?

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f_allwein
> During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the
> National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist

Normally, digital libraries have a limited number of "copies" (I suppose
that's what they mean by "waitlist"). In this case, it seems like they
suspended the limitation.

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sudhirj
I'm trying to build something similar on
[https://papiary.com/](https://papiary.com/)

Trying to put the public domain classics on there one by one, and build a
really nice reading experience.

Help and feedback welcome.

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tarp
Standard ebooks is also working that

[https://standardebooks.org/](https://standardebooks.org/)

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sudhirj
That’s a fantastic resource, thanks a ton. Will link to their download pages
instead of trying to make my own files.

I’m looking more at reading online directly, having the book read to you,
choosing your own fonts etc, and ultimately helping people write their own
books.

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murtio
The libgen project is so far the best in those times, and any time.

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qqn
Agreed. [http://gen.lib.rus.ec](http://gen.lib.rus.ec) is my go-to. If it ever
goes down then a quick web search or a visit to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis)
and the new mirror appears.

Also, literally everyone already knows this, but SciHub for journal articles:
[https://sci-hub.tw](https://sci-hub.tw) (mirrors:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub)).

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crystaln
Are they flouting copyright laws or do they have agreement from publishers? I
didn’t see any mention of how they are doing this legally.

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gowld
Yes. Instead of asking for donations for rightsholders, they are betting that
rightsholders aren't going sue them for copyright violation.

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perpetualpatzer
I'm interested in what triggered this... is this just distributing the ebooks
that various textbook publishers are offering free access to for the semester?
It seems weird to me that they wouldn't have been doing this sooner if they
had the rights, or that they would be doing it at all if they didn't.

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cbhl
From the FAQs, it looks like normally the Internet Archive uses DRM to limit
the number of borrowed copies to the number of physical copies they have.
Instead, they are now temporarily allowing more digital copies of the book to
be borrowed than physical copies exist. There still will be DRM, requiring you
to "re-borrow" the book every 14 days, but under the temporary system you will
get the book again right away (instead of having to go to the back of a line,
and waiting for other people to get their 14-day turns).

The collection is more than just textbooks; I saw at least one work of
fiction. (Note that you might want such books for, say, an English class.)

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rynop
How do you "check out" one of these to a kindle? I see you can download a
kindle file, but dunno how to get that to sync to my kindle devices.

My goal is to show my 5th grader how to checkout a book to his kindle eReader
by himself..

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justinc8687
You can either use Amazon's email-to-kindle service, or just plug your Kindle
into your computer with a USB cable. It should show up as a drive, and you can
just copy the file over.

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rynop
Thank you Justin!

