The partnership between Wikipedia and the Internet Archive may be designed to further advance a controlled digital lending model
Wikipedia, established in 2001, is one of the top 10 websites in the world. While it’s sometimes accused of unreliability, the site does require reliable sources—or citations—for every claim made in its articles. And many times, those sources are books, not online content.
Wikipedia has made it possible to click on some book citations and jump to a PDF preview of the book hosted by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that we’ve reported on before (more on that in a minute). Further, if the Wikipedia citation includes a book page number, you’ll jump right to that page in a two-page preview. A message appears above the preview: “This book can be borrowed for 14 days.” Next to the message is a button that reads, “Log In and Borrow.” That’s right—you can check out the digital book from the Internet Archive just as you would from your local library.
Currently, according to Klint Finley at Wired, the Internet Archive has turned 130,000 references in Wikipedia entries into direct links to 50,000 books that the organization has scanned and made available to the public. Finley writes, “The organization eventually hopes to allow users to view and borrow every book cited by Wikipedia, with the ultimate goal being to digitize every book ever published.” According to Mark Graham at the Internet Archive, the organization scans 1,000 books per day; nearly 4 million titles have been scanned already.
This change appears to more aggressively promote what’s known as controlled digital lending. We reported on this back in February. The concept is simple, yet controversial: libraries digitize print books in their collection, then lend out the digital edition just as they would the print edition. So, if the library has a single print copy in its collection, it can remove it from circulation, scan it, then lend the digital edition instead of the print edition—in a secured form, to prevent copying or further distribution—to one person at a time. This is what the Internet Archive is currently doing on a national scale (and actively soliciting donations of books to scan). Anyone anywhere can get an Internet Archive virtual library card and start borrowing books. Of course, the legality of all of this is hotly disputed by advocacy organizations for both publishers and authors.
At Publishers Lunch, Michael Cader drew the development to everyone’s attention with the headline “For Your Lawyers” (subscription required). So far, even though the traditional publishing industry has come out against controlled digital lending, no legal action has been taken. But Cader says the Archive’s latest move “could vastly expand the exposure of their free lending library” and make the situation more urgent.
Bottom line: Imagine a values spectrum for the people who most care about books. On one end of that spectrum, you can find commercial and traditional publishers, most literary agents, and author advocacy organizations who fight to protect the sales and commercial value of books and copyright. On the other end, you can find organizations like Internet Archive, primarily concerned with universal access to all knowledge. (Librarians tend to be in the same community.) Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are natural partners whose missions are well aligned, but it makes them potential enemies of commercial publishers and authors who make a living from selling their work. The controlled digital lending dispute is not so dissimilar from the current library embargo on ebooks by Macmillan or the Google Books scanning case from years ago. The fragile compromise that has been struck between these two sides over the last five or 10 years is becoming strained.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
