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Category Archives: Libraries

Publishers’ reply brief in Hachette v. Internet Archive: First Impressions

Dave Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney jointly authored this post. They are also the authors of a White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books. We are not, as the Publishers claim in their brief on page 13, a “cadre of boosters.” We wrote the paper independently as part of our combined decades of work on libraries access to knowledge. [On March 15, 2024] the publishers (Hachette, Harper Collins, John Wiley, and Penguin Random House) filed their reply brief on appeal in their  long-running lawsuit against Internet Archive, which challenges (among other things) the practice of controlled digital lending. For the months after the decision, we had been observing all the hot takes, cheers, jeers, and awkward declarations about the case, the Internet Archive itself, and Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) This post is not part of that fanfare. Here, we want to identify a few critical issues that the publishers focus on in their brief, including some questionable fair use analysis that they repeat from the district court below. Much of the brief is framed in heated rhetoric that may cause alarm, but much like publishers’ announcements about interlibrary loan, e-reserves, or document delivery, we believe controlled digital lending is here to stay, regardless of the lower court’s poor copyright analysis and current publisher’s brief…”

Public Libraries Saw 92 Percent Increase In Number of Titles Targeted for Censorship Over 2022

“The number of titles targeted for censorship surged 65 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, reaching the highest levels ever documented by the American Library Association (ALA). The new numbers released today show efforts to censor 4,240 unique book titles* in schools and libraries. This tops the previous high from 2022, when 2,571 unique titles… Continue Reading

Caselaw Access Project

“The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online, in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library. We created CAP’s initial collection by digitizing roughly 40 million pages of court decisions… Continue Reading

Libraries struggle to afford the demand for e-books and seek new state laws in fight with publishers

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — “Whenever bestselling author Robin Cook releases a new medical thriller, the head of the public library in West Haven knows demand for digital copies will be high. So will the price. Like many libraries, West Haven has been grappling with the soaring costs of e-books and audiobooks. The digital titles often… Continue Reading

Every March, Tournament of Books is a month-long battle royale among year’s best novels

Tournament of Books: “But it’s not really a contest. We’re not even sure it’s a “tournament.” What the ToB has been and will be, as long as we’re putting it on, is a month-long conversation about novels and reading and writing and art that takes place on weekdays in March. Here’s how it works. Throughout… Continue Reading

More than 2 million research papers have disappeared from the Internet

Nature: “More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research… Continue Reading

We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them

The Neglected Books Page: “Apoorva Tadepalli published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times recently, titled “We Need to Read the Forgotten Geniuses, Not Rescue Them” [unpaywalled]. As anyone who’s familiar with this site can imagine, this was an article I read with interest. For over forty years, I’ve been fascinated with looking for forgotten… Continue Reading

Libraries are on the front lines of America’s problems

Axios: “…Zoom out: At the same time, libraries are grappling with everything from the high cost of e-books to the need to provide free outdoor Wi-Fi so people without broadband can have off-hours access. Many libraries are trying to ease food insecurity by adding gardens, nutrition classes, food pantries and cooking lessons. “During the pandemic,… Continue Reading

The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech

The Verge: “Social media companies have long made their own rules about the content they allow on their sites. But a pair of cases set to be argued before the Supreme Court on Monday will test the limits of that freedom, examining whether they can be legally required to host users’ speech. The cases, Moody… Continue Reading

Émigrés Are Creating an Alternative China, One Bookstore at a Time

The New York Times [no paywall]: “From Tokyo and Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Amsterdam and New York, members of the Chinese diaspora are building public lives that are forbidden in China and training themselves to be civic-minded citizens — the type of Chinese the Communist Party doesn’t want them to be. They are opening Chinese… Continue Reading

Tools for Thinking About Censorship

ReactorMag – “One price of free speech is eternal humility, recognizing that none of us is immune to becoming a tool of censorship if we fail to recognize its manipulative tactics. Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?” This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks… Continue Reading