Hmm... so, at first blush at least, this sounds like a pretty Big Deal, and a Good Thing. From the press release:<p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i><p>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.
Original source on the Internet Archive blog: <a href="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/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy...</a>
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.
> 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<p>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.<p>But what is the plan here to achieve this mission while respecting copyrights?
How is this different from this project?
<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gutenberg.org/</a><p>It seems books that are so old they enter the public domain end up at Gutenberg in eBook format.<p>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.