The disappearing virtual library - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

“Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free... scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. The texts ranged from so-called ‘orphan works’ (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues... To the publishing industry, this event was a victory... To many other people - namely the users of the site - it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees? ... The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning... So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates - the people who create and run such sites - think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before. But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu... are legion. They live all over the world, but especially in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in India... It was only the fact that library.nu included a link to another site ("sharehosting" sites like ifile.it, megaupload.com, or mediafire.com) containing the complete version of a digital text that brought library.nu into the realm of what passes for crime these days... As with Napster in 1999, library.nu was facilitating discovery... In their effort to control this market, publishers alongside the movie and music industry have been effectively criminalising sharing, learning and creating - not stealing. Users of library.nu did not have to upload texts to the site in order to use it, but they were rewarded if they did. There were formal rules (and informal ones, to be sure), concerning how one might "level up" in the library.nu community... In the end, it was only by donating to the site that law authorities discovered the real people behind the site - pirates too have PayPal accounts... the scholarly publishing industry has entered a phase like the one the pharmaceutical industry entered in the 1990s, when life-saving AIDS medicines were deliberately restricted to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits... The comparison is perhaps inflammatory; after all, scholarly monographs are life-saving in only the most distant and abstract sense, but the situation is - legally speaking - nearly identical... Scholarly publishers have made the trade-off between offering a very low price to a very large market or a very high price to a very small market. But here is the rub: books and their scholars are the losers in this trade-off... The publishing industry we have today cannot - or will not - deliver our books to this enormous global market of people who desperately want to read them... To make matters worse, our university libraries can no longer afford to buy these books and journals; and our few bookstores are no longer willing to carry them. So the result is that most of our best scholarship is being shot into some publisher's black hole where it will never escape. That is, until library.nu and its successors make it available... What these sites represent most clearly is a viable route towards education and learning for vast numbers of people around the world. The question it raises is: on which side of this battle do European and American scholars want to be?”