archive.org 1 hour checkout?
 

Anyone know what's up with this? Previously you could check out books for several days, a week or somesuch. And you could download the PDF. Now you can only check it out for 1 hour and it's only to read online.

And it's for books that, as far as I can tell, are in the public domain. (For example, https://archive.org/details/wunpost0...ge/n7/mode/2up, which is available on gutenberg.)

Could be that archive.org changed things because of the law suit.

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/ar...-A-Basic-Guide

It says:

Thanks. It was right there in front of me with that I in the white circle. I've never seen one where the borrowing duration can be changed.

Recently introduced because of "Internet Archive sued by Big Publishers".

For more details on that lending period specifically, check out the Internet Archive's statistics in:

"Sizzle Then Fizzle: Buzzy Titles and Borrowing Digitized Books"

90% of books are only opened/read for <1 hour and never touched again. Being locked for a full 14 days would prevent hundreds of people from being able to borrow such a book.

For the public domain books what I want is to be able to download the pdf/txt files. And for the public domain books there shouldn't be any need to restrict how many times they're checked out simultaneously. I'm guessing that they don't have the resources to determine which are public domain so they're using the same procedure for almost everything although old magazines can still be downloaded.

Agreed.

If you believe they're wrongly categorized/restricted, you can also report that in their form:

https://openlibrary.org/contact

Or the Internet Archive email:

info@archive.org

I recently came across a post-1923 reprint of a 1912 book. Should've been in the public domain.

And the public domain books aren't available in the main Archive.org Books search?

Or does the Archive.org page also point to the OpenLibrary to borrow?

If you think the data is wrong, report it. They'll fix it eventually.

A lot of this metadata is based on automated tools that try to pull years from title/copyright pages (and/or a human input the info wrongly).

I did for the one that I was interested in. It's still restricted to 1 hour and I haven't heard back from them. That was several weeks ago.

If it's PD, it will be available somewhere else as an unlimited download.
If it's in copyright, then it's parasitical as unlike real libraries, even ones with ebooks, archive pays nothing in royalties. It's cheating the authors and publishers.

Now I can't get archive.org to find the book I'm talking about; the title is Hoofbeats. I only saw it when I accidentally forgot to restrict the search to texts. But here's another book by him that's limited to an hour. He died in 1946.

https://archive.org/details/mylifeeastwest0000hart

Here you go, O Wise One:

https://archive.org/details/hoofbeat...ge/n7/mode/2up

(Be careful where you step!) :eek:

Thanks for the link. That helps.

If the book was published in 1933, it may or may not be still under copyright in the US. That book falls into the 1923-1963 range, where copyrights had to be renewed.

See Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database:

I did a search for that author/book, and don't see any renewals. This only means it may be public domain in the US*, it's not a guarantee.

I could see why the Internet Archive might err on the side of "still copyrighted" since IA is US-based.

If he died in 1946, then most other countries in the world have Life+70, which would become public domain in 2016.

Maybe someone can get a copy of Hoofbeats over to Gutenberg Canada.

Ok, thanks. But still no downloadable PDF/txt.

That's my guess as well. I'm being peevish complaining about it here.

Or Fadedpages