The blog post has a bit more information about what's going on: <a href="http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-eme...</a><p>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.
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.
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.<p>Seems like it needs some volunteer contribution to do some curation / tagging / rating to get people to be able to use it successfully...
On the one hand, I love the IA and really hate to see them burn Bridges/risk getting shut down.<p>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.
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?
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 <i>End of Days</i>. Go figure. Brown was 'a medium with psychic abilities.'<p>Yep, that's where we're at. Viewed 20 times more than 'You Can Negotiate Anything'.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games</a>
Signing up doesn't seem to work.<p>Filled out the captcha, and the "Sign Up" button is just spinning forever. It's been a few minutes.
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 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710232" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710232</a>