From the Internet Archive blog:
Thank you for your willingness to invest in the future of publishing and readership. Libraries and publishers have a lot in common: we connect writers with readers which promotes literacy scholarship and citizenship.
We want to buy more digital books from you.
We currently buy, lend, and preserve eBooks from publishers and booksellers, but we have not found many eBooks for sale at any price. The Internet Archive is running standard protection systems to lend eBooks from our servers through our websites, openlibrary.org and archive.org. In this way, we strive to provide a seamless experience for our library patrons that replicates a traditional library check-out model, but now with eReaders and searching.
By buying eBooks from you, we hope to continue the productive relationship between libraries and publishers. By respecting the rights and responsibilities that have evolved in the physical era, we believe we will all know how to act: one patron at a time, restrictions on copying, re-format for enduring access, and long term preservation.
We understand these are early days, and prices will evolve. What we would like to do, however, is not lose the relationship libraries have built up with publishers just because we are now buying and lending electronic books rather than physical ones.
Our checkbook is open. Please sell to us.
Sincerely,
Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
(inspired by one from Douglas County’s in Colorado)
