The publishers' lawsuit against the Internet Archive (Hachette v. Internet Archive) has resulted in the removal of more than 500,000 books from our lending library, including over 1,300 banned and challenged titles. We are actively appealing this decision to restore access for all our patrons.
We want to hear from you! How has losing access to these books affected your reading or research? What does it mean to you that these 500,000+ books are no longer available? Please share your story below.
Your feedback may be featured in our blog posts and other communications to highlight the impact of this significant loss on our library community.
There’s absolutely a good number of duplicates among the list they shared.
The bigger implication is of the 4 publishers in this lawsuit, 3 of them are in The Big Five publishers, who hold rights to the vast majority of books (60-80-ish % of English language books) from this century and probably a good chunk of the last one. If they win, this is the tip of the iceberg.