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The Archive was not transforming the books in question into something new, but simply scanning them and lending them as ebooks from its web site.“An ebook recast from a print book is a paradigmatic example of a derivative work,” Koeltl wrote. “Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle wrote in a blog post Friday. “For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society — owning, preserving, and lending books. This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”
While the Authors Guild was among those opposing the emergency library, some writers praised it. Historian Jill Lepore, in an essay published in March 2020 in The New Yorker, encouraged readers who couldn’t afford to buy books or otherwise were unable to find them during the pandemic to “please: sign up, log on, and borrow!” from the Internet Archive.