Show of hands: how many people check internet archive before buying a book vs checking for a 2.99 kindle copy before buying directly from the publisher? (as if you wouldn't buy the print copy from Amazon -- who strong arms the publishers into unsustainable prices). To be fair this is a distribution problem not a copyright issue. The claim is not that internet archive is taking credit for writing the books. They're distributing them for free. Scapegoating internet archive won't fix the bad deals with the largest distributors that are causing way more damage to their bottom line. The publishers have been screwed way worse by lax regulation, than someone distributing their books on a website most people use to look at websites archived from 20 years ago.
I find this piece to be guilty of conflating big business publisher profits with those of individual authors.
> Incidentally, there are 149 people in the Toronto Public Library system alone earning six-figure salaries. I’m pretty sure there aren’t that many earning that much in all of Canadian book publishing.
Why don't you just come out and admit that publishers are reaping massive profits that do not flow to individual authors. Pardon me while I don't shed a tear for these profiteers. You did a disservice by framing this on the backs of authors.
Sadly the article's author has tried to frame what the archive did 2020 to reduce people needing to visit a public library to loan a book, as something they've always done. Prior to 2020, what I ever found at archive.org the copyright had expired and completely open to sharing.
