Ernie SmithJun 28, 2024
The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.
Show threadWiredfireJun 28, 2024

@ernie while I totally agree from a moral pint of view, IA knew they were flaunting rules and got sloppy / arrogant about it. While the copyright system BADLY needs reform IA brought this world of pain onto themselves knowing that system very well and should have known better.

For me it raises a pressing matter of who archives the archive..? We need redundancy of such important services to protect them against catastrophe be that technological or bureaucratic.

Show threadWiredfireJun 28, 2024
@ernie what IA were doing may have been morally right but we all know morality doesn’t come into copyright law 😒
Show threadErnie SmithJun 28, 2024
@wiredfire I think IA pushed the edges of the program a little too hard during the pandemic but the idea of checking out digital forms of physical books is how things should work. It’s infuriating that it does not
Show threadWiredfireJun 28, 2024
@ernie absolutely, it’s maddening. In a similar way I have a stack of physical books but I just don’t read them, I always pick up the Kobo instead. There is no legal route for me to simply format-shift them to digital. Of course there are plenty of routes I could go to furnish myself with digital copies, but still.
Show threadWiredfireJun 28, 2024
@ernie There was a service that tried to do this for a while, you had to write a message in the book and send photo as evidence and it used that to determine one book = one ebook. Naturally publishers hated this idea and the whole thing fell apart fairly quickly 😠
Show threadJessamynJun 28, 2024
@wiredfire @ernie I have never heard of that "write a message in the book to prove ownership" thing and as a librarian who has also worked at Open Library, I am very curious, Do you remember what it was called?
Show threadWiredfireJun 28, 2024

@jessamyn @ernie it was called “Shelfie”. All gone and burried now but this is an article that touches on how it worked from the end user point of view:

https://time.com/4146187/shelfie-app-free-ebooks/

How to Turn Your Paper Books Into (Free) E-books and Audio Books

A new app doubles as a social media platform for the book-obsessed

Time
Show threadJessamynJun 28, 2024
@wiredfire @ernie Thank you!
Show threadWiredfire
@jessamyn @ernie you’re welcome! ☺️
Jun 28, 2024 at 9:36pmWeb