The National Emergency Library and Its Discontents

“They scan books illegally and put them online,” he wrote, and pointed to a digital copy of his autobiographical novel “Sag Harbor” that was “not one bought by a library they ‘have an arrangement with.’ It’s a scan of a not-for-sale advance copy for book reviewers.” Indeed, you can see the cover of “Sag Harbor” at the Archive, which contains a note from Whitehead to that effect.Other well-known writers echoed Whitehead’s point; as did the Authors’ Guild, which declared that the Archive “has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author.”Storyline Online, at least, has a relationship with publishers. You do not have the right to create your own videos from the books we use unless you negotiate your own permissions with the rights holders of those books.” The Internet Archive, on the other hand, does not negotiate with publishers at all.Digital-focused information “liberators” such as Kahle have been at odds with artists and publishers for decades. More recently, there has been litigation in federal courts touching on an issue raised by the Archive’s actions: whether an owner of a digital copy of a creative work can re-sell it without permission, the way one sells used books or records. “We moved in ‘Internet Time’ and the speed and swiftness of our solution surprised some and caught others off guard,” he wrote, saying that the Archive would add staff members to help authors remove their books from the emergency library, as Whitehead has done. If the Archive can’t, by default, treat its scan of your book as its own copy to loan, its collection will dwindle to almost nothing—a tiny assortment of works by authors who deliberately choose to distribute their work without compensation, out of a selfless desire to educate the world during a crisis.The fact that so many prominent authors have lashed out against this idea speaks to the precarious times we live in.