On the Internet Archive

Internet optimism, knowledge and corporate greed

A version of this article was first published on the 12th September as an exclusive in Prospect Magazine’s wonderful The Culture newsletter—they’ve very kindly allowed me to republish it here (and I’ve tweaked/amended/expanded a little). You can subscribe to that newsletter here.

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A little over two years ago, I was near finishing my MPhil dissertation. Each day, I’d go to the library, seeking starched silence, placid light, and sit down for ten hours or so—often, I’d go out to the pub to meet my friends around 7p.m., then come back to the library to work after a couple of pints, something I genuinely think worked very well. The majority of my days were taken up with research, endless reading and Googling and scrolling and cross-referencing. I had assumed that the focus of my dissertation (female American writers of the 1970s, specifically Hardwick, Didion and Adler, if you’re curious) was near enough to the present to be fairly straightforward, research-wise; besides, I had a copyright library, complete with free interlibrary loans, at my disposal. I soon found that I was wrong.

All too often, a quote, an article, some vague reference mentioned off-hand in some review would promise to solve a key issue—if only I could find it. I lost hours raking through the library’s search facilities, through WorldCat, through the pelagic depths of Google Scholar searches. One such instance involved trying to find a book published in the early 1970s: the library, I was told, might have it, could have it, possibly in physical holdings, possibly via an interlibrary loan. In the end, they didn't, couldn’t; I despaired, told myself to move on, didn’t move on, couldn’t move on. My coursemate asked if I had checked the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital lending library. I signed up, and within five minutes I had found the book I wanted, searched the text contents and found the exact quotes I needed.

From then on, the Internet Archive was my constant companion, my saviour. An independent feminist magazine from some time in 1973? They had it. An early edition of a novel that contained a different introduction from the version now in print? They had it. A book I couldn’t remove from the reference section of the early-closing main university library that I needed to check a quote from at 1.a.m? They had it. I could search the text, I could look things up at home; I could rediscover, redisseminate. There is a certain delight that comes with the discovery of access—I suppose you would call it freedom; the stir of air through an opened window on a warm day. An inner world reaching outwards, an outer world reaching inwards.

I finished my MPhil, moved on from academia; yet the Internet Archive has remained a constant source of both inspiration and information for me. When I wrote about the author Elaine Kraf, her novels long out-of-print, I used the Internet Archive to find editions of her works to refer to (this led, later, to the reissuing of her novels). Frequently, I use the resource to read books from forgotten authors of the 20th century—particularly female, experimental authors, who are often consigned to the backlist of history—that I then buy physical versions of where possible, as well as to consult introductions unavailable in later editions and read books only published in the US that would be prohibitively expensive to ship over. It has more prosaic uses, too: often, when writing articles or reviews, I have borrowed books through the Archive that I already own in physical form purely to more easily search their contents.

The Internet Archive is so beloved that, when last week the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the ruling against the site in its legal battle with the publisher Hachette—resulting in the removal of more than 500,000 books and the death knell of the site as we know it—my friend messaged me right away. I responded, without hyperbole, “genuinely devastated”. I’m not alone. For me, the ruling against the Internet Archive is more than just an inconvenience, just as its value is more than just a convenient resource. It is a vast repository of art, culture, truth—one of the last vestiges of the lost dream of the early internet, when we believed in, or desperately wanted to believe in, the web’s democratic educational potential.¹ This idea is mostly gone, now: the internet is presently owned by a handful of giant corporations and social media sites, anything half-good is paywalled, and the rest of is a no-man’s land of ads and worthless, meaningless ‘content’, scavenger-birds of SEO consultants snipping at the shrivelled carcasses of new media companies. The Archive is a relic, a literal manifestation of a now outmoded concept of equal access to information; the universal right to knowledge made (cyber-)flesh.

The mechanism the Internet Archive uses to lend books is simple. Called a “controlled digital lending model,” or CDL, it means that print books owned by the library are scanned in, with the digital version available to be borrowed by one person at a time—much the same way a traditional lending library operates. In the suit, the Hachette Book Group—along with Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley—alleged that the Archive violated copyright and fair usage. Crucially, the publishers took issue with both the Archive and the concept of CDL itself, calling them tantamount to “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale”.

This has worrying implications for other libraries, for whom CDL is a common practice. For years, libraries have said that ebooks—which, unlike with both print books and the CDL materials used by institutions such as the Archive, can only be licensed by libraries, not owned—are prohibitively and unfairly expensive, costing around three times the price of a hardback equivalent. On top of this, libraries are forced by publishers to renew their rights to hold ebooks after 26 checkouts or one-to-two years; when the demand for digital versions is constantly increasing, this means that libraries have to dedicate larger and larger proportions of their budgets simply to continue to offer them. Often, this money goes to private third-party companies that lease the ebooks from their publishers and lend them, at significant markup, to the libraries. At a time when libraries face an existential threat to their existence—incessant funding cuts, mounting expenses—the publishers’ war on CDL seems not only unfair but quite grotesquely cruel. It should be staggering, unbelievable; instead, it’s a familiar tale of capitalist rapacity from an industry grown bloated and gouty on its own greed.²

This sucks, indeed!

Some people, I’m sure, will trot out the tiresome argument that the Archive is not necessary, that rather than borrowing CDL materials from online libraries, you should source ebooks from local lenders instead. This is a facile argument: often, libraries simply don’t have the ebooks you would like for the economic reasons laid out above; if they aren’t bestsellers, what is the point of buying them? Indeed, I’ve often asked local libraries to purchase digital copies of books I would like, only to be told, after months of waiting, that it isn’t possible. It also elides the fact that the publishers' war on CDL materials, coupled with their insistence on ebooks, means that libraries are no longer able to own their own books, to control their own collections, manage their own archives. What happens if a publisher decides to update the edition? To remove access? With ebooks, access to those texts is simply lost forever.

The argument also doesn’t account for people who live outside countries where these books have been published, or for those who live in areas where these books have been banned from conventional libraries. In the US, for instance, 2023 saw 4,349 book bans across 23 states and 52 public school districts. According to PEN America, the majority of books removed “talk about LGBTQ+ identities, that includes characters of colour, that talk about race and racism, that include depictions of sexual experiences in the broadest interpretation of that understanding”; for good measure, Florida schools have also banned some of the classics, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and Anna Karenina.

Speaking on the initial ruling, Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Harvard Law, stated: “culture needs more than commercial publishing. If the business model of commercial publishing controlled our access to our past, then much of who we were, and much of how we learned to be better, would simply disappear.” I agree. The case against the Internet Archive is not just a story about the ruination of an online library, but a grander narrative of our times: how money facilitates the transference of knowledge away from the public, back towards the few.

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Mostly unrelated

• NeglectedBooks.com, one of my all-time favourite sites

• A recommendation if you have a spare, boring afternoon at work to go to the Internet Archive and search for publishers like the o.g. Fiction Collective/Dalkey Archive and have a browse of what comes up

• The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer, which is haunting and beautiful and which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about

• Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark, which I’m reading right now

• This Lana leak from the Ocean Blvd sessions called ‘Zodiac’, about the victims of the Gilgo Beach serial killer. Available only in very LQ, but the gas-lamp static of it only adds to the haunting, spectral quality of the song, like we’re overhearing something we shouldn’t. I might write about it at some point; I think it’s very special

• This wonderful 1983 documentary about Dylan Thomas that I found on the BBC Archive (hands-down the best bit of iPlayer)

1. Pretty much the only sites left that still carry the banner for this old-style of internet optimism are, to my mind, the Archive and Wikipedia (and YouTube videos from 2008).

2. In just the first half of 2024, Hachette Book Group’s parent company, Lagardère, made €1.31 billion in total revenue and €113 million in profit.