I was happy, then, to participate in the Open Library project, by putting my own work into an anthology to be published for digital lending. I understand—at a deep level, the level on which I wonder how I will pay the mortgage and what I will eat in my old age—how alarming the Open Library can sound to a writer. I feel that alarm: the sense that our already precariously remunerated work might be distributed for no money at all, that the greedy and impersonal culture of torrenting and piracy might be coming for us, too.
But practically, the idea is the idea of the library book. for—shared with one person at a time, and then returned to the shelf. The distribution may be virtual and seemingly unreal, but it behaves like a phone number database solid item. It behaves more like a solid item, in fact, than many provisionally available movies or texts on the consumer market, which act as your personal property for only as long as the underlying licensing agreement between the rights-holder and the seller lasts. That sort of dissolving culture isn’t a renewable revenue source, it’s a path to scarcity and amnesia.
Librarian: If the publishers’ lawsuit is successful, “libraries of all varieties and the communities they serve will suffer.”
On July 8, 2022, Benjamin Saracco, medical school librarian, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit brought against the Internet Archive by four commercial publishers. These are his remarks.