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Ten years ago we moved to a new house. It had a nice dry basement with no hint of any prior flooding events. So we stored dozens of cartons of paper books down there, pending unpacking and shelving. There was an ice storm and some storm drains in the area became blocked. Ten inches of water in the basement for a few hours. A "once in a generation event" said the local paper.
The lifetime of about a thousand paper books: two or three minutes. Right then my ebook collection began to grow like Topsy.
Internet Archive aims to gather and save for posterity all the knowledge there is. So why does it base itself in a time and place where that is impossible with all the major publishers and nut cases breathing down their neck? And their attempts to get around that pressure like "one hour loans" are pathetic.
And the quality control, at least in the small bit I use is simply terrible. Things scanned in China, twisted, misaligned, pages missing, no checks of any kind. Automated OCR and text formats, including epub, that are simply unreadable. How is this saving information for the future? It is like intentionally screwing it up to provide job security for some future generation of digital archaeologists.
In many ways, the shadow libraries do a better job.
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