Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library will offer 1.4 million e-books for free

With people stuck at home due to the coronavirus lockdown, Internet Archive, the American digital library, has opened the National Emergency Library. This online library hosts a collection of more than 1.4 million copyrighted e-books that you can access for free, till June 30 at least. Or till the US national emergency is over - whichever is later.

The Internet Archive mentioned that they have taken this step to help deal with the global need to access research materials. They have also suspended the waitlist for books and have created an emergency library. Users can borrow books from the National Emergency Library without being on the waitlist.

Earlier, Internet Archive's Open Library only allowed people to "borrow" digital copies of the books it held in storage and those could be taken for a limited amount of time. All the books are now being made freely available for students and researchers around the world.

Also read: Wikipedia has COVID-19 information in Bangla, Hindi, Tamil and 6 other Indian languages

"This library brings together all the books from Phillips Academy Andover and Marygrove College, and much of Trent University's collections, along with over a million other books donated from other libraries to readers worldwide that are locked out of their libraries," wrote Internet Archive on their blog.

"This was our dream for the original Internet coming to life: the Library at everyone's fingertips," said Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

Some people have, however, raised questions about whether this move is a violation of copyright since books available through the National Emergency Library don't just include academic tomes but best sellers as well.

The Author's Guild, an industry body that had called the Internet Archive a "violation of copyright" some years ago, wrote in a blog post, "Internet Archive has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author. We are shocked that the Internet Archive would use the COVID-19 epidemic as an excuse to push copyright law further out to the edges, and in doing so, harm authors, many of whom are already struggling."

Besides the copyrighted books in the National Library, Internet Archive also offers free access to 2.5 million downloadable public domain books.

The Internet Archive has said that authors and publishers are going to be impacted by this global pandemic and urged people to buy the books if they can.

"We encourage all readers who are in a position to buy books to do so, ideally while also supporting your local bookstore. If they don't have the book you need, then Amazon or Better World Books may have copies in print or digital formats," they added.