A lot of my writer friends have been alarmed by the @internetarchive's #NationalEmergencyLibrary, an electronic lending library.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/25/national-emergency-library/#universal-access

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The Archive has long acquired and scanned books and made them available as DRM-locked PDFs that one person at a time could check out, building on firm copyright precedent, notably the #HathiTrust decision.

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The vast majority of "checkouts" from the Archive have always been fleeting -- literally minutes long. Basically, it's a quick way to double-check a reference or look up a passage (a lot of checkouts are generated by people following references from Wikipedia).

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The NEL works like the Archive's existing e-lending program, but it lifts its one-reader-at-a-time restriction. The Archive's basis for this is that the books in their holdings - the vast majority of which have no official electronic edition - are otherwise inaccessible.

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The Archive's announcement raised many cheers and also provided aid to many people, but it also made a lot of people who were already in precarious and frightening situations very angry.

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I get that. I have three books out in 2020 and was planning 6 tours in four countries for them. I don't know if any of those will happen nor whether there will be any bookstores to carry my books. This year was to be very important to my family's finances.

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It's not a good year for anyone, and there's never a good time for a pandemic (obvs), but this timing is really anxiety-provoking for me.

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(Let me pause here and mention that I've got it ten million times better than, say, people whose economic precarity dictates they have to risk their lives working at an Amazon warehouse during the crisis and I'm both thankful for that and even more worried for them).

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So I totally get why people would be upset if they thought that the Archive was attacking their livelihoods at this incredibly stressful, fearful time.

What's more the Archive doesn't really provide much by way of usage statistics to help people understand the NEL's utility.

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In part that's just a mistake the Archive made, but it's also the result of the Archive's privacy-first stance - they've put a lot of time and energy into ensuring that they don't log things that might compromise users' privacy (they even sued the USG over the Patriot Act).

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So it's hard for them to produce the kind of data other services routinely provide (which, on balance, does not speak well of those other services).

But now, finally, they've produced some stats, and they're pretty reassuring, IMO.

https://blog.archive.org/2020/04/07/the-national-emergency-library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks/

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First of all, let's recall that the NEL's ebooks are not Kindle files or Epubs, they're scanned PDFs. They are the books you get if you can't get any other books. The text can't be flowed, it can't be copy-pasted, and the search is based on flawed, unreliable OCR.

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With that in mind:

* The majority of NEL checkouts last less than 30 minutes. That's people checking a reference, looking up a quote, etc. The kind of thing you'd call a reference librarian for if the libraries were open.

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* The NEL only has books that are more than five years old. 90% of the books that are checked out are more than 10 years old.

* These books typically have NO official ebook edition, such as this one:

https://twitter.com/GCWOonagh/status/1247107092105908225

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* The Archive believes (but has not fully validated) that in 90% of instances, the books that patrons check out are only opened once, irrespective of whether they're held for the full two-week lending period.

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I understand why this freaked people out. If you're an author like me worried that pandemic might wipe out your publisher, your next book, the bookstores you rely on, and your career, this could seem really scary.

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But I think the actual facts in evidence show that this is an entirely benign adjunct to libraries, delivered in timely fashion to a world of people who rely on books (including writers!) in times of crisis. It is not substitutive, it's not cannibalistic.

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For librarians, teachers, and parents engaged in home-schooling, the NEL is a really important resource.

I get that you might still be angry at the Archive. You can take your books out of the NEL if you are:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QjErbouWG7pUlzcxPcRk4YEtbYs8ItlVTgLa1DfGh68/edit

eof/