Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Actual libraries buy licenses for digital eBooks from the publishers, they do not scan their own copies.
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Yes they do get their own collections scanned (see Side Note).
Also see Techdirt article:
Libraries Have Never Needed Permission To Lend Books, And The Move To Change That Is A Big Problem
and an article by Kyle K. Courtney (Lawyer) that was heavily quoted in the above article:
Libraries Do Not Need Permission To Lend Books: Fair Use, First Sale, and the Fallacy of Licensing Culture
Side Note: I was also digging around a lot of the links, and ran across this talk given at the Boston Public Library in February 2019:
The Future of the Book and Digital Access
Broken down into these roughly equal parts:
- Boston Public Library
- Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle)
- MIT Press (Amy Brand, Director)
- Cambridge Public Library (Maria McCauley, Director of Libraries)
- Q&A
Throughout, they discussed importance of scanning/digitizing all forms of media (including books).
In Brewster Kahle's talk, plus the Q&A, lots of examples were brought up, but I thought this was the most interesting:
- Wikipedia citations
- Making sure all those links are available at the click of a button, jumping you to the exact page that's cited.
- ~10 million dead links have been corrected.
- Archive.org covers ~30% of all books referenced at least twice (9% referenced at least once).
He also discussed stats about book lending/access/citations (similar to the "20th century black hole"). You see a peak around public domain works, then a huge trough throughout the entire 20th century, until you reach more modern times.
Also See: Internet Archive's latest blog posts for lots of interesting info. For example, this one was a few weeks ago:
Sizzle Then Fizzle: Buzzy Titles and Borrowing Digitized Books
A book with a very limited print-run was referenced in a court case, then mentioned in the New York Times,
Quote:
[...] so there were very few copies in libraries. It was a “buzzy” title—everyone wanted a copy, including both political parties, the media, and Justice Kavanaugh’s supporters and detractors. Because of the limited supply and high demand, book sellers were offering used copies for thousands of dollars online. It was essentially impossible to locate a copy.
[...] Because there was only one physical copy of the book, only one person could checkout the digital copy and read it at a time, and with our standard 14 day circulation period, the digital book would circulate an estimated 30 times per year. Those who wanted to queue up to read the book could join a waitlist, just like at your public library. And they did. Within 24 hours of making the book available at archive.org, its waitlist had jumped to more than 400 people. In the nearly 18 months since, the waitlist topped out at more than 800 people, meaning that someone joining the list at its peak would be waiting more than 20 years for their turn to read.
But all of that changed when we launched the National Emergency Library which gave us an unexpected opportunity for an experiment. By suspending waitlists for our books, all of the users on the waitlist could check out the book without delay. [...]
It turned out most users did not want to check out the book when they were eventually offered the opportunity. Some did check out the book, but few. In the week after the launch of the NEL, 50 copies were on loan. Following our previously reported circulation patterns, 90% of those borrows go stagnant within the first hour (most much faster), meaning that users stop interacting with the book, so there were may be closer to five actual readers of the book. Today, the book is not checked out by any users. This blog post will again raise interest in the book, and so it will likely have more borrows over the next week (the number likely depends on the reach of this post) before it again returns to a lower, post-buzz circulation level.
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