‘Emergency’ Online Library Draws Ire of Some Authors - The New York Times

"It was initially presented as a rare and welcome sliver of good news for the literary world. Last week, Internet Archive, a nonprofit group, announced that it would drop the access restrictions for its scanned books to make them widely available to readers during the coronavirus outbreak. Calling it “a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners,” the group said it would suspend the wait-lists for about 1.4 million books until the end of the public health crisis. Some early positive coverage of the project noted that it was filling a void, making books accessible at a time when many libraries and bookstores across the country have closed. But authors quickly began criticizing the effort, calling it piracy masquerading as public service. Some argued that the free online library would deprive authors and publishers of royalty payments — at a moment when sales are declining and many writers are struggling. After NPR and The New Yorker ran reports praising the National Emergency Library (the headline over the historian Jill Lepore’s essay in The New Yorker called it “a gift to readers everywhere”), several prominent writers, including Colson Whitehead, took to social media to condemn the project..."