The Internet Archive has ended its ‘emergency library’ early
Photo by Sebastian Kahnert/picture alliance via Getty Images
After four commercial publishers filed a lawsuit earlier this month, the Internet Archive ended its National Emergency Library program earlier than planned, the organization said in a blog post (via ArsTechnica). It opened the “emergency” program in March, providing free access to 1.4 million books for people unable to get to classrooms or libraries during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Emergency Library is part of the Open Libraries initiative, in which the Internet Archive scans libraries’ books, allowing digital “check-outs” via a waiting list. But the Emergency Library did away with the waiting lists and made the scanned books immediately available.
The intent was to keep the Emergency Library up and running through June 30th. But...