 More than 500,000 books have been removed from the Internet Archive's lending library due to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged titles. π Our patrons have shared powerful stories about how this loss has impacted them, and we need your help to make a change. Sign our open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to these books. πβοΈ #LetReadersRead 81 comments
@internetarchive IA, I love you and I use your site. But you done goofed up and I hope you don't do what you did again going forward.
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17 June at 16:31 | Open on shitposter.world
  @internetarchive To be honest, it's not necessarily a bad thing that less people are being induced to run proprietary malware that implements digital handcuffs for the "loan" anti-feature.
If you choose to share a book, it should be shared without handcuffs.   @internetarchive Is there a complete list of every book affected by the ruling?
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@internetarchive the problem with open letters is they are open to just throw them away and not care. We need fundamental change. Corps can embargo works for a century or more under current copyright law. We need a change. Anything more than 50 years should become public domain no matter what it is. To ask for longer is just pure greed.  @internetarchive normally i refuse to sign change.org petitions, due to their being hosted on cloudflare
but i'll make an exception this one time , because I support you *that much* #letReadersRead
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@internetarchive It fucking sucks. Imagine if the civilization that comes after us can't access a lot of our information and arts because the companies copystriked them before the meteor hit. @vibia
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@internetarchive There is so much variety in the thing we call "book" and what is covered (uniformly) by (c). In the Google Books project, many academic authors stated they wanted their books to be available, even for free. And in some instances, factual books have been shown to warrant less protection than fiction. We need a revision of (c) that is more realistic and also that actually promotes science and the useful arts.  @kcoyle @internetarchive @PJ_Evans @internetarchive I also want to point out that scanned books are a much poorer reading experience than e-books - it's just a photograph of book pages, with maybe some un-reviewed OCR text behind it. Fine perhaps for some searching, discovery of a proper noun in a large amount of text, but we can't promote careful reading with this technology. I hope that someone is working on a way to turn these images into actual book text. @kcoyle @internetarchive @PJ_Evans @internetarchive The text can be really garbled. Note that it is offered to the visually impaired and I would like to hear how well it is working for them. When I look at it, it's a mess for things like tables of contents; plain text renders better, but there are still errors. Could something be set up where the text could be corrected by humans? @internetarchive Server's having a bad hair day - takes a couple tries, but I got'er. π @internetarchive Ah, that may be why I couldn't manage to source a pdf of Dworkin's Intercourse which I was trying to track down today.    @internetarchive Iβm sorry, but the Lending Library itself goes against the best spirit of IA. These are hundreds-year-old books in the PD. @internetarchive I've signed and donated. As an author, I'm VERY concerned about preserving access to the vast body of work (including out-of-print and public-domain books) that is in danger of becoming unfindable. I'm MUCH LESS concerned that having my own works be available in a nonprofit online library like the Internet Archive could somehow cost me sales or hurt my bottom line. With all respect, I believe the publishers' lawsuit is wrong, and contrary to the values we share.  @internetarchive if you want to read one of those book, check it out from a library that actually paid the author for the book, or buy it. Authors don't write books as a charity project and deserve to be paid for their work unless they give it away for free. @internetarchive Iβll say again that the LL goes against the best spirit of IA. A library holding on to PD works and titrating access to them serves the same function as museums who make Wikipedia afraid to use 200-yo portraits in bios of famous people.  @internetarchive @joncamfield But if people start reading books they could start thinking. If current events show us anything, it is that no one wants people to think. @internetarchive @internetarchive I appreciate the effort to appeal to publishers, but wouldn't it be better to lobby Congress to amend copyright law to give libraries permission to engage in CDL? |
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