Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US) libraries.

Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole, but rather can be saved one page at a time as PDFs. I'm pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and the additional generation of conversion and republication further degrades the quality of original-publication formats. (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or manually-converted documents, but those of course lose all the characteristics of original publication.)

And of course, many materials still under copyright are not accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure. I'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted to HN:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047> (thread).

And my request still stands. Anyone with an academic affiliation who can check <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503> and see how it relates to this post (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841>) would have my gratitude.

For me, I became concerned when they fibbed about why the Internet Archive Credit Union was liquidated. IA alleged it was shut down due to onerous regulations, but the government said IA actually never lived up to their goal of allowing local, low-income folk to sign-up for their service. https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...

> a jealous amicus brief that the Authors’ Guild settlement would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too

that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do agree with you on this part though

> the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of doing nothing

Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently created its e-library was not ideal.

It will have consequences far beyond the immediate lawsuit too.

The very concept has basically been iced for a generation and the net is only getting more locked down not less.

Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and our political process. I would argue that having a powerful, rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing such a law less likely, not more.

I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we have today.

The article says:

> You’d get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you’d have to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You’d flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a few minutes for the command to propagate.

If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released, it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.

If you have an LP or wire spool recording, the audio is the key, obvious work. But then you have the album cover, the spool case, and the physical condition of the media. Being able to see an album cover or read a reporter's notes/labeling is almost as important as the audio.

If they don't have that prerogative, they probably should, and Congress should legislate that to be the case.

Exciting!

Follows link

Link no longer exists, gets O'Reilly front page instead

"Introducing the AI Academy, Help your entire org put GenAI to work"

Thanks O'Reilly.

A third party page still has links to some (possibly all) of the books: https://zapier.com/blog/free-oreilly-press-books/