Post #3214942

2025-07-01 15:53 UTC

@dhobern@scicomm.xyz @Yuvalne@433.world - Yes, they are still doing this. Scans of books are distributed by Internet Archive in multiple formats: as ebooks with some restrictions, but also (and more widely used) as unrestricted images of pages with a unique URL for each page. See discussion and detailed walk-through here: https://nwu.org/what-is-the-internet-archive-doing-with-our-books/

Replies (1)

@dhobern@scicomm.xyz 2025-07-02 03:20

@ehasbrouck@urbanists.social @Yuvalne@433.world Thank you - although that's the same link, and the unlimited-numbers-of-copies part in your first message relates only to a short period during the pandemic. The part to which I can understand authors objecting (and even then IA is not the real cultural enemy) is the business about IA sharing scans for in-copyright books without paying the higher fee that libraries do for sharing copies. Do you have any figures for what fraction of in-copyright books appear in IA? Pretty much everything I access is either out of copyright or else provided by the publishers/authors for public-good reasons. And the ones that I've seen loaned seem only to have minimal sample pages otherwise accessible (far fewer pages than e.g. a typical Amazon sample view). For example, is IA sharing copies of the books you've authored? Can you provide some concrete examples of books which illustrate the harm? Thanks.

Open ##3214943