[8bitsrule]

In my whole life, I've never heard of a significant author who complained about one of their books being in a library, or about library patrons as 'thieves'.

IA has deals with countless libraries, and since the libraries are closed, and the online schools are open, I very much doubt that IA will keep up with the temporary loss of the libraries or the needs of schools.

"Public support for this emergency measure has come from over 100 individuals, libraries and universities across the world"

[geofft]

The distinction is that each library needs to buy a copy - if not several copies - of the book. Patrons of libraries cause money to end up in the pockets of authors/publishers. If a library wants to make a book available to multiple patrons, it needs to buy multiple copies.

IA is suspending the check-out logic they'd previously been using on these scans, which breaks that connection. Now a thousand people stuck at home can read the same scans free online.

(My opinion here, without thinking very hard, is that what IA is doing is reasonable for out-of-print books or books not available in ebook form, especially textbooks and such, but probably less reasonable for recent books easy available as ebooks. It may still be fair use in both cases, though.)

[DanBC]

> I've never heard of a significant author who complained about one of their books being in a library, or about library patrons as 'thieves'.

Libraries have had their day: Horrible Histories author: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/13/libraries-horr...

Horrible Histories is a significant set of books, now also tv programmes, in the UK.

[leephillips]

This is not a complaint about libraries or library patrons. I love and use libraries. Authors love to see their books in libraries, including their ebooks. The details matter. Scanning a book and putting it on the internet without the right to do so is not what a library does.

[dorchadas]

I think there might be some misunderstanding. There was a good comment on Reddit [1] about how all this was legal. From what I gathered, libraries scanned books that didn't have digital copies already made, and offered them to patrons to "check out". They used software to make sure that they only checked out a total combined digital/print number equal to the number of print copies they had bought, with software to make sure they couldn't be copied. That seems fair, to me (and is, apparently, legal). The National Emergency Library basically opens that up to anyone now, however, with no limits on how many times a book can be checked out at once.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/fpsqm0/the_internet_...

[leephillips]

I don't think there is a misunderstanding. In fact, your informative comment explains the crucial difference between what a legitimate, copyright-respecting library does and what the "Emergency Library" is doing. This is, in fact, why authors, who never complained about real libraries, are complaining about this.

[justinclift]

Didn't Google do that too a few years ago, and get away with it?

[leephillips]

No, they didn't get away with it, which is why they only display short excerpts from books in search results.