This is a 2 parter. Posting an article from the Author's Guild along with a response from the Internet Archive.
The Author's Guild is ensuring the world knows it's incapable of adapting to technological change and would prefer we all regress to 1886 stamp press publishing along with all attendant scarcities of scale.
Several important things to note:
- This exchange reveals writers are being paid by libraries for eBooks per download. There has to be a way to game that, like to automate checkouts so our guys get the right amount of attention, or make their guys too expensive to keep on the shelves.
- The average writer in the US makes about $20k a year, putting them just below Denny's waitresses and scrap collectors in terms of income. Public attitudes are being shaped by vagrants and food stamp recipients, as they always have been. The difference here is these ones can afford cell phones.
- There are too many fucking authors if they can have a guild, and they're all stupid for joining something called a guild. We have to think about solutions humanely, in a way that doesn't involve public executions.
----------------------------------
Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors
MARCH 27, 2020
The Authors Guild is appalled by the Internet Archive’s (IA) announcement that it is now making millions of in-copyright books freely available online without restriction on its Open Library site under the guise of a National Emergency Library. IA has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author. We are shocked that the Internet Archive would use the Covid-19 epidemic as an excuse to push copyright law further out to the edges, and in doing so, harm authors, many of whom are already struggling.
With mean writing incomes of only $20,300 a year prior to the crisis, authors, like others, are now struggling all the more—from cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work, income supplementing jobs, and speaking engagements. And now they are supposed to swallow this new pill, which robs them of their rights to introduce their books to digital formats as many hundreds of midlist authors do when their books go out of print, and which all but guarantees that author incomes and publisher revenues will decline even further.
IA is using a global crisis to advance a copyright ideology that violates current federal law and hurts most authors. It has misrepresented the nature and legality of the project through a deceptive publicity campaign. Despite giving off the impression that it is expanding access to older and public domain books, a large proportion of the books on Open Library are in fact recent in-copyright books that publishers and authors rely on for critical revenue. Acting as a piracy site—of which there already are too many—the Internet Archive tramples on authors’ rights by giving away their books to the world.
Last year, the Authors Guild and authors sent hundreds of takedown notices to IA and protested the inclusion of their books in the Open Library program. Now, during this pandemic that has severely disrupted authors’ lives and choked the publishing industry, IA once again is undermining authors’ ability to make a living and decide who gets access to their copywritten material.
BACKGROUND
As the Authors Guild has written before, IA’s Open Library has already infringed the rights of hundreds of thousands of living authors as well as estates. IA self-designated itself as a library, though in actuality it is nothing but a website operator that sends millions of books to China for illegal scanning and then lends those books as ebooks out to anyone who visits their site—all in clear violation of copyright law. Unlike a real library, IA never bought or licensed the ebooks it distributes through its Open Library website. Until now, Open Library at least limited the “lending” to one user at a time for each hard copy book scanned (which in some cases includes dozens of copies of a particular title), comparing it to libraries lending out a hard copy book.
IA has made far-fetched claims that it is protected by fair use, but an appellate court case last year squarely decided the issue against them, as we advised them it would. There is simply no basis in the law for scanning and making copies of entire books available to the public. Now, IA has gone further and stripped away the one-user-at-a-time limitation so that any number of readers can access any of 1.4 million books at any time through a couple clicks on openlibrary.org.
As we have learned from prior conversations with IA when we pointed out the illegality of Open Library and the harm to creators caused by giving away books for free online, IA’s leadership is unsympathetic to the plight of authors and their need to earn money from their work. They were insensitive to our arguments as to why unlicensed, unpaid delivery of free books hurts authors and harms the public good in the long run. They were, and clearly still are, unable or unwilling to make the connection between authors’ ability to pay bills and the ability to keep writing. Although IA pays its staff, it apparently doesn’t believe that authors who write as a profession (as compared to academics who write books) need to be paid—as though authors live on air alone. When IA takes authors’ books without paying and gives the books away to anyone in the world who wants them, it is doing nothing less than stealing directly out of authors’ pockets.
As Authors Guild President Doug Preston states, “IA’s Open Library is giving away books that are not theirs to give away. It’s as though they looted a bookstore and started handing away books to passersby. They are hurting authors and bookstores at a time when they can least bear it. Anyone in America already has access to free ebooks through local libraries. There are over 100,000 libraries in the country where the public can access free ebooks.”
A SOLUTION WITHOUT A PROBLEM
AI is pretending to fix a nonexistent problem. It claims that the so-called “Emergency Library” is meant to provide students with “access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar.” There are several misrepresentations in that statement.
There is no new, unfulfilled need for students to have free books due to the coronavirus. Students are indeed facing major challenges during this period, but access to books is not one of them. Publishers are already addressing any needs created by the closures and ensuring that students and their teachers have access to the books they need. The Association of American Publishers has posted a listing of many publishers’ programs to get books to students, teachers, and parents during the shutdown. And students are already accustomed to buying or renting their books online; indeed, many universities don’t even have physical bookstores anymore, and many textbook publishers deliver books to students through online subscription services. The shutdown has not interfered with these online markets.
HITTING US WHEN WE’RE DOWN
Publishers and authors want their books read. Readers do not need Open Library to come to the rescue by further harming the marketplace for books—at a time when the industry is already feeling incredible pain from the bookstore and library closures. Publishers, authors, bookstore owners, and readers have been coming together in magnificent ways these last few weeks to support this fragile industry, so much of which relies on razor-thin margins. Bookstores are closing, forced to lay off staff, small publishers are already hurting so badly that some fear going under if the shut own lasts too long. Everyone is working to support one another and especially the bookstores, so vital to our literary culture. But rather than supporting authors and book publishing, the Internet Archive is undermining it when the industry faces a crisis of epic proportions. Appalling indeed.
---------------------------------
Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library
Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students access books while their schools, school libraries, and public libraries are closed.
We’ve been asked why we suspended waitlists. On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.
This 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.
And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection. As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive. Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.
One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library. The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time. That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.
Is the Internet Archive a library?
Yes. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity and is recognized as a library by the government.
What is the legal basis for Internet Archive’s digital lending during normal times?
The concept and practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) has been around for about a decade. It is a lend-like-print system where the library loans out a digital version of a book it owns to one reader at a time, using the same technical protections that publishers use to prevent further redistribution. The legal doctrine underlying this system is fair use, as explained in the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending.
Does CDL violate federal law? What about appellate rulings?
No, and many copyright experts agree. CDL relies on a set of careful controls that are designed to mimic the traditional lending model of libraries. To quote from the White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books:
“Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use— an “equitable rule of reason”—permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books. The first sale doctrine, codified in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, provides that anyone who legally acquires a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display, or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. This is how libraries loan books. Additionally, fair use ultimately asks, “whether the copyright law’s goal of promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it.” In this case we believe it would be. Controlled digital lending as we conceive it is premised on the idea that libraries can embrace their traditional lending role to the digital environment. The system we propose maintains the market balance long-recognized by the courts and Congress as between rightsholders and libraries, and makes it possible for libraries to fulfill their “vital function in society” by enabling the lending of books to benefit the general learning, research, and intellectual enrichment of readers by allowing them limited and controlled digital access to materials online.”
Some have argued that the ReDigi case that held that commercially reselling iTunes music files is not a fair use “precludes” CDL. This is not true, and others have argued that this case actually makes the fair use case for CDL stronger.
How is the National Emergency Library different from the Internet Archive’s normal digital lending?
Because libraries around the country and globe are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Internet Archive has suspended our waitlists temporarily. This means that multiple readers can access a digital book simultaneously, yet still by borrowing the book, meaning that it is returned after 2 weeks and cannot be redistributed.
Is the Internet Archive making these books available without restriction?
No. Readers who borrow a book from the National Emergency Library get it for only two weeks, and their access is disabled unless they check it out again. Internet Archive also uses the same technical protections that publishers use on their ebook offerings in order to prevent additional copies from being made or redistributed.
What about those who say we’re stealing from authors & publishers?
Libraries buy books or get them from donations and lend them out. This has been true and legal for centuries. The idea that this is stealing fundamentally misunderstands the role of libraries in the information ecosystem. As Professor Ariel Katz, in his paper
Copyright, Exhaustion, and the Role of Libraries in the Ecosystem of Knowledge explains:
“Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence… As long as the copyright ecosystem has a public purpose, then some of the functions that libraries perform are not only fundamental but also indispensable for attaining this purpose. Therefore, the legal rules … that allow libraries to perform these functions remain, and will continue to be, as integral to the copyright system as the copyright itself.”
Do libraries have to ask authors or publishers to digitize their books?
No. Digitizing books to make accessible copies available to the visually impaired is explicitly allowed under 17 USC 121 in the US and around the world under the Marrakesh Treaty. Further, US courts have held that it is fair use for libraries to digitize books for various additional purposes.
Have authors opted out?
Yes, we’ve had authors opt out. We anticipated that would happen as well; in fact, we launched with clear instructions on how to opt out because we understand that authors and creators have been impacted by the same global pandemic that has shuttered libraries and left students without access to print books. Our takedowns are completed quickly and the submitter is notified via email.
Doesn’t my local library already provide access to all of these books?
No. The Internet Archive has focused our collecting on books published between the 1920s and early 2000s, the vast majority of which don’t have a commercially available ebook. Our collection priorities have focused on the broad range of library books to support education and scholarship and have not focused on the latest best sellers that would be featured in a bookstore.
Further, there are approximately 650 million books in public libraries that are locked away and inaccessible during closures related to COVID-19. Many of these are print books that don’t have an ebook equivalent except for the version we’ve scanned. For those books, the only way for a patron to access them while their library is closed is through our scanned copy.
I’ve looked at the books and they’re just images of the pages. I get better ebooks from my public library.
Yes, you do. The Internet Archive takes a picture of each page of its books, and then makes those page images available in an online book reader and encrypted PDFs. We also make encrypted EPUBs available, but they are based on uncorrected OCR, which has errors.
The experience is inferior to what you’ve become accustomed to with Kindle devices. We are making an accessible facsimile of the printed book available to users, not a high quality EPUB like you would find with a modern ebook.
What will happen after June 30 or the end of the US national emergency?
Waitlists will be suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. After that, the waitlists will be reimplemented thus limiting the number of borrowable copies to those physical books owned and not being lent.
The Author's Guild is ensuring the world knows it's incapable of adapting to technological change and would prefer we all regress to 1886 stamp press publishing along with all attendant scarcities of scale.
Several important things to note:
- This exchange reveals writers are being paid by libraries for eBooks per download. There has to be a way to game that, like to automate checkouts so our guys get the right amount of attention, or make their guys too expensive to keep on the shelves.
- The average writer in the US makes about $20k a year, putting them just below Denny's waitresses and scrap collectors in terms of income. Public attitudes are being shaped by vagrants and food stamp recipients, as they always have been. The difference here is these ones can afford cell phones.
- There are too many fucking authors if they can have a guild, and they're all stupid for joining something called a guild. We have to think about solutions humanely, in a way that doesn't involve public executions.
----------------------------------
Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors
MARCH 27, 2020
The Authors Guild is appalled by the Internet Archive’s (IA) announcement that it is now making millions of in-copyright books freely available online without restriction on its Open Library site under the guise of a National Emergency Library. IA has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author. We are shocked that the Internet Archive would use the Covid-19 epidemic as an excuse to push copyright law further out to the edges, and in doing so, harm authors, many of whom are already struggling.
With mean writing incomes of only $20,300 a year prior to the crisis, authors, like others, are now struggling all the more—from cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work, income supplementing jobs, and speaking engagements. And now they are supposed to swallow this new pill, which robs them of their rights to introduce their books to digital formats as many hundreds of midlist authors do when their books go out of print, and which all but guarantees that author incomes and publisher revenues will decline even further.
IA is using a global crisis to advance a copyright ideology that violates current federal law and hurts most authors. It has misrepresented the nature and legality of the project through a deceptive publicity campaign. Despite giving off the impression that it is expanding access to older and public domain books, a large proportion of the books on Open Library are in fact recent in-copyright books that publishers and authors rely on for critical revenue. Acting as a piracy site—of which there already are too many—the Internet Archive tramples on authors’ rights by giving away their books to the world.
Last year, the Authors Guild and authors sent hundreds of takedown notices to IA and protested the inclusion of their books in the Open Library program. Now, during this pandemic that has severely disrupted authors’ lives and choked the publishing industry, IA once again is undermining authors’ ability to make a living and decide who gets access to their copywritten material.
BACKGROUND
As the Authors Guild has written before, IA’s Open Library has already infringed the rights of hundreds of thousands of living authors as well as estates. IA self-designated itself as a library, though in actuality it is nothing but a website operator that sends millions of books to China for illegal scanning and then lends those books as ebooks out to anyone who visits their site—all in clear violation of copyright law. Unlike a real library, IA never bought or licensed the ebooks it distributes through its Open Library website. Until now, Open Library at least limited the “lending” to one user at a time for each hard copy book scanned (which in some cases includes dozens of copies of a particular title), comparing it to libraries lending out a hard copy book.
IA has made far-fetched claims that it is protected by fair use, but an appellate court case last year squarely decided the issue against them, as we advised them it would. There is simply no basis in the law for scanning and making copies of entire books available to the public. Now, IA has gone further and stripped away the one-user-at-a-time limitation so that any number of readers can access any of 1.4 million books at any time through a couple clicks on openlibrary.org.
As we have learned from prior conversations with IA when we pointed out the illegality of Open Library and the harm to creators caused by giving away books for free online, IA’s leadership is unsympathetic to the plight of authors and their need to earn money from their work. They were insensitive to our arguments as to why unlicensed, unpaid delivery of free books hurts authors and harms the public good in the long run. They were, and clearly still are, unable or unwilling to make the connection between authors’ ability to pay bills and the ability to keep writing. Although IA pays its staff, it apparently doesn’t believe that authors who write as a profession (as compared to academics who write books) need to be paid—as though authors live on air alone. When IA takes authors’ books without paying and gives the books away to anyone in the world who wants them, it is doing nothing less than stealing directly out of authors’ pockets.
As Authors Guild President Doug Preston states, “IA’s Open Library is giving away books that are not theirs to give away. It’s as though they looted a bookstore and started handing away books to passersby. They are hurting authors and bookstores at a time when they can least bear it. Anyone in America already has access to free ebooks through local libraries. There are over 100,000 libraries in the country where the public can access free ebooks.”
A SOLUTION WITHOUT A PROBLEM
AI is pretending to fix a nonexistent problem. It claims that the so-called “Emergency Library” is meant to provide students with “access to assigned readings and library materials that the Internet Archive has digitized for the remainder of the US academic calendar.” There are several misrepresentations in that statement.
There is no new, unfulfilled need for students to have free books due to the coronavirus. Students are indeed facing major challenges during this period, but access to books is not one of them. Publishers are already addressing any needs created by the closures and ensuring that students and their teachers have access to the books they need. The Association of American Publishers has posted a listing of many publishers’ programs to get books to students, teachers, and parents during the shutdown. And students are already accustomed to buying or renting their books online; indeed, many universities don’t even have physical bookstores anymore, and many textbook publishers deliver books to students through online subscription services. The shutdown has not interfered with these online markets.
HITTING US WHEN WE’RE DOWN
Publishers and authors want their books read. Readers do not need Open Library to come to the rescue by further harming the marketplace for books—at a time when the industry is already feeling incredible pain from the bookstore and library closures. Publishers, authors, bookstore owners, and readers have been coming together in magnificent ways these last few weeks to support this fragile industry, so much of which relies on razor-thin margins. Bookstores are closing, forced to lay off staff, small publishers are already hurting so badly that some fear going under if the shut own lasts too long. Everyone is working to support one another and especially the bookstores, so vital to our literary culture. But rather than supporting authors and book publishing, the Internet Archive is undermining it when the industry faces a crisis of epic proportions. Appalling indeed.
---------------------------------
Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library
Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students access books while their schools, school libraries, and public libraries are closed.
We’ve been asked why we suspended waitlists. On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.
This 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.
And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection. As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive. Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.
One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library. The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time. That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.
Is the Internet Archive a library?
Yes. The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity and is recognized as a library by the government.
What is the legal basis for Internet Archive’s digital lending during normal times?
The concept and practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) has been around for about a decade. It is a lend-like-print system where the library loans out a digital version of a book it owns to one reader at a time, using the same technical protections that publishers use to prevent further redistribution. The legal doctrine underlying this system is fair use, as explained in the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending.
Does CDL violate federal law? What about appellate rulings?
No, and many copyright experts agree. CDL relies on a set of careful controls that are designed to mimic the traditional lending model of libraries. To quote from the White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books:
“Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use— an “equitable rule of reason”—permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books. The first sale doctrine, codified in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, provides that anyone who legally acquires a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display, or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. This is how libraries loan books. Additionally, fair use ultimately asks, “whether the copyright law’s goal of promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it.” In this case we believe it would be. Controlled digital lending as we conceive it is premised on the idea that libraries can embrace their traditional lending role to the digital environment. The system we propose maintains the market balance long-recognized by the courts and Congress as between rightsholders and libraries, and makes it possible for libraries to fulfill their “vital function in society” by enabling the lending of books to benefit the general learning, research, and intellectual enrichment of readers by allowing them limited and controlled digital access to materials online.”
Some have argued that the ReDigi case that held that commercially reselling iTunes music files is not a fair use “precludes” CDL. This is not true, and others have argued that this case actually makes the fair use case for CDL stronger.
How is the National Emergency Library different from the Internet Archive’s normal digital lending?
Because libraries around the country and globe are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Internet Archive has suspended our waitlists temporarily. This means that multiple readers can access a digital book simultaneously, yet still by borrowing the book, meaning that it is returned after 2 weeks and cannot be redistributed.
Is the Internet Archive making these books available without restriction?
No. Readers who borrow a book from the National Emergency Library get it for only two weeks, and their access is disabled unless they check it out again. Internet Archive also uses the same technical protections that publishers use on their ebook offerings in order to prevent additional copies from being made or redistributed.
What about those who say we’re stealing from authors & publishers?
Libraries buy books or get them from donations and lend them out. This has been true and legal for centuries. The idea that this is stealing fundamentally misunderstands the role of libraries in the information ecosystem. As Professor Ariel Katz, in his paper
Copyright, Exhaustion, and the Role of Libraries in the Ecosystem of Knowledge explains:
“Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence… As long as the copyright ecosystem has a public purpose, then some of the functions that libraries perform are not only fundamental but also indispensable for attaining this purpose. Therefore, the legal rules … that allow libraries to perform these functions remain, and will continue to be, as integral to the copyright system as the copyright itself.”
Do libraries have to ask authors or publishers to digitize their books?
No. Digitizing books to make accessible copies available to the visually impaired is explicitly allowed under 17 USC 121 in the US and around the world under the Marrakesh Treaty. Further, US courts have held that it is fair use for libraries to digitize books for various additional purposes.
Have authors opted out?
Yes, we’ve had authors opt out. We anticipated that would happen as well; in fact, we launched with clear instructions on how to opt out because we understand that authors and creators have been impacted by the same global pandemic that has shuttered libraries and left students without access to print books. Our takedowns are completed quickly and the submitter is notified via email.
Doesn’t my local library already provide access to all of these books?
No. The Internet Archive has focused our collecting on books published between the 1920s and early 2000s, the vast majority of which don’t have a commercially available ebook. Our collection priorities have focused on the broad range of library books to support education and scholarship and have not focused on the latest best sellers that would be featured in a bookstore.
Further, there are approximately 650 million books in public libraries that are locked away and inaccessible during closures related to COVID-19. Many of these are print books that don’t have an ebook equivalent except for the version we’ve scanned. For those books, the only way for a patron to access them while their library is closed is through our scanned copy.
I’ve looked at the books and they’re just images of the pages. I get better ebooks from my public library.
Yes, you do. The Internet Archive takes a picture of each page of its books, and then makes those page images available in an online book reader and encrypted PDFs. We also make encrypted EPUBs available, but they are based on uncorrected OCR, which has errors.
The experience is inferior to what you’ve become accustomed to with Kindle devices. We are making an accessible facsimile of the printed book available to users, not a high quality EPUB like you would find with a modern ebook.
What will happen after June 30 or the end of the US national emergency?
Waitlists will be suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. After that, the waitlists will be reimplemented thus limiting the number of borrowable copies to those physical books owned and not being lent.
