With interesting insider interviews with Publishing Industry experts. Well also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and books. The latest book reviews. And well talk about the current nonfood auction books featured on cspans book tv. And welcome to about books. In a few minutes, well talk with internet archives founder brewster kael about digital libraries and electronic book lending and about the high profile copyright case that publishers have brought against his organization. But first, heres two news items from the publishing world. Well, simon and schuster recently announced that it will publish the latest book by bestselling historian doris kearns goodwin. Its titled an unfinished love story a personal history of the 1960s. The publisherescribes the book as equal parts biography, memoir and historywhich takes readers along on the journey that ms. Goodwin and her husband, richard, embarked upon in the final years of his life. Ms. Goodwin said about the book, quote, america has been at odds with itself before. Ive been drawn to such turbulent times. This is the story of one of those times of my husband and myself and our generation shaped by the cataclysms of the 1960s, unquote. Ms. Goodwin is best known for biographs of american president s, including 2000 fives team of rivals about abham lincoln and his cabinet. Her new book is set to be released in april of 2024. And some sad news from the independent booksellers scene. It lost one of its champions last month. The San Francisco chronicle reported that neil soft man died on september sixth. He was 75 years old. Soft man was founder of a clean, welllighted place for books, which operated in the San Francisco area for nearly 25 years. More recently, he was coowner of bookshop west portal. And it was mr. Solomon who is credited with the popular phrase among booksellers give a book because no one ever talks about the tie that changed his life. Heres some video from the cspan archives of mr. Solomon back in 1998, talking about the importance of independent bookstores. Now theres still what many wonderful libraries and many wonderful librarians, but we no longer have a robber baron whos building libraries around the country and we are losing much of the infrastructure that we once had as a place to go and learn about our own heritage. And thats what bookstores were doing in the last 15, 20 years. They were placing much of what was lost in libraries as we were having our our budgets cut back in our municipalities. And certainly in our Public Schools, in i, i, i went to the library in the Public School and not that many schools have libraries anymore. And thats one of the reasons that independent bookstores are so important to the people who work in independent bookstores tend to work for much longer periods of time. Our Mission Statement as booksellers has much more to do with a way of life and what we want to do with our lives than a corporation, corporate booksellers have a Mission Statement, which is fundamentally to return the largest profit to their investors. Thats what they have to do. Otherwise, their investors are going to take their money and invest it elsewhere. Consequently, they have to keep labor costs down. They have to. And and if they do keep labor costs down, its never enough. Theyve got to keep cutting back because they always have to have ever improving profits. So they do not want to sponsor career booksellers. They dont want staff who spend too much time with the public because that costs the money. They they, by definition, want to sell the most books for the least cost. And thats very different from most booksellers. For most of us, i think in some ways what andy said is true. A lot of us feel like we dont quite fit in elsewhere. We we know books. We continue to what we dedicate our lives to. And, you know, theres almost nothing more enjoyable than than to talk to people about books. And we dont have anybody to come over to us and say, now, you got to go help another customer or you got to go do something else. We all have to stay in business. With his ever shrinking margins. But we have a very different Mission Statement, and thats one of the things that separates independence from the smallest to the largest independent. We have a different calling than the Corporate Stores and now a discussion on digital libraries and electronic book lending. Cspan. Peter slen recently sat down with internet archives founder brewster kael, Whose Organization is involved in a high profile and high stakes copyright case. And now we want to introduce you to brewster kael. He is the founder of something you might be familiar with. Its called the internet archive. Mr. Kael, what is the purpose of the internet archive . The internet archive is a Nonprofit Research library largely used over the internet by people trying to dive deeper into wikipedia articles by clicking through on the citation, signs on the bottom and finding themselves on web pages that it might have been disappeared or on books. Right at the right page to be able to follow up and learn more. How many unique visitors do you have a day or per year . Per day . We get about 2 Million People coming to the website, but about 5 million come and use the internet archives resource in one way or another. Its about a between the 200th and most or 300th most popular website. So people actually want a library. And is it free . Yes, everything is free on the internet archive. We collect web pages, books, music, video. And the idea is that this is free public access. And yes, you can borrow books. You can look at all web pages. Its a its a library. So when you founded this in 1996, what was your thought behind it . The idea is to build universal access to all knowledge. Could we go and make the Digital Library of alexandria . Right. Could we actually make it so that people that are curious enough to want to have access to the published works of humankind, they could get access to it. That was the promise. When i was growing up, you walked into a library and they said, we have everything, and if we dont have it here, well get it for you. That was the promise of the internet that i signed on to in 1980 to try to help build the internet into that. By 96, it was time to build the library and so weve been building this library for the last 27 years. Well, there was a recent headline on a website called the conversation. It says that the internet archives Digital Library has been found in breach of copyright. What is this about . So what happened is weve been with about a hundred other libraries directly and a couple of hundred other libraries have been lending digital ized books since 2011. So we we try to buy ebooks, but it turns out that the big publishers will not sell ebooks, which is really strange. We should go back into that. But because they will not sell ebooks to libraries, were taking the physical books that we have digitize using them often from the 20th century, long out of print, and we lend them to one reader at a time. So its 26 possible readers a year for one of the books that we own. And suddenly this became a big trauma for the publishers in the early pandemic. The idea that people would be able to check out art and 26 readers could see a particular book in a year and this they sued the internet archive. And at the District Court level in new york, where they brought this, even though were in calif, you dont have anything to do with new york. The the District Court judge said that this is not right for us to do for books that are in publishers ebook collections that are licensed to libraries. Well, mr. Kail, theres a couple of things we want to break down there. First of all, why wont why cant you get an ebook copy, a digitized copy of a book from a publisher . The internet archive for years and years has been trying to buy ebooks. They buy them in the same sense that we would own a physical book. Right. What libraries do is they buy preserve and lend. Thats what they do. And the publishers are saying in the electronic world, you cannot buy an ebook, you cannot preserve an ebook, and you cannot lend an ebook that all of that is going to be controlled by them and under their terms. So they wont allow you to buy and and they can take away or change electronic books at any time. So what happens if you go to your Public Library and you think youre borrowing a book from your Public Library, an ebook . Actually, what theyre doing is shunting you to their database at the publisher or overdrive, which is controlled by the publishers, and they get all the surveillance information about whos reading what and on and what page and all of that. That is not in the tradition of library practices. So weve tried to buy ebooks. There are a few small publishers that will sell ebooks, but very few. So basically of the big libraries, they own nothing in the digital age. And that is atrocious. So thats why weve had to go and do the awkward thing of acquiring physical books, storing those permanently. So we have a physical book that isnt circulating. Digitize it and lend it one reader at a time, using the same protections that the publishers use for their imprint works for a dusty, musty old, sort of not very good scans. But this turns out to be extreme. Only useful to wikipedia users that want to go and do a fact check. What we find is people use these books for about 30 seconds to a minute. Couple of minutes. Mostly, they basically go to a page, check it out, and then theyre done with it. Its like being standing next to a stacks in a library. Thats what were for. Thats what we are as a Research Library. Its not for beach reading, but this is was what the publishers decided to make a massive lawsuit, three years and counting. Now its being appealed. Its extremely expensive to come up against billion dollar corporations as a Nonprofit Research library. How do you digitize the books . Whats the process . We acquire the books we own on them. If its a modern book, make sure that we dont have it already. Right. So we try to basically just do this once so that theres only one book that gets gets digitized and the book is photographed. So a person turns the page, each page goes to click turns a page, raises and lowers glass. So that a nice image and click, click, click, click petals through a book. And then they just check the disks to make sure all the page numbers in there. Nothings fuzzy. It costs tens of dollars per book to go and digitize our books. Then the physical book is preserved forever, which is an expensive investment. The books are worth it. And then we take the digital file and we make it available to the blind and dyslexic. So the major use of these books is to the blind and dyslexic, and then we make other uses available that were allowed to do. For instance, interlibrary loan of a chapter or control Digital Lending until this whole fight came up, it was going on for ten years. Everybody was happy with it. It seemed like it all was working and so this is the ways that we are using these as well as machine learning. People are going and trying to find the first uses of words and phrases and things like that. Research purposes, all the flowers and shakespeare, that kind of type of research. How did women and blacks be portrayed in early 20th century fiction . Those types of Research Questions are the types of things that people are using. The internet Archives Book collections for. So you use the number 26. And what is what is that reference . Thats two weeks. So if somebody wants to read a book more than just a couple of pages where they sort of do it and then they hand it back, which is by far and away what happens. But if you want to go and compare it to Something Like going and borrowing a book from a Public Library that youre going to read, then you can check out a book for up to four, up to two weeks, and then you can try to renew it. But it means that theres basically 26 readers maximum per per book. And it turns out there are many, many, many, many, many fewer because were dealing with dusty, musty, were dealing with the 20th century, were dealing with the long tail of books we never even put up the most recent five years of books, just to stay away from the the publishers interest and to try not attract their ire, but their ire in the early pandemic came to light. So, brewster carl, do you consider the internet archive to be a Community Lending library . In a sense . I think of it as a Research Library. So there are different kinds of libraries, so and its not so much a Lending Library in the sense that people would go and take this and then read the whole book. Thats just not its not how we see people used the internet archives collections. Its a Research Library that if you wanted to go and do some fact checks on the wikipedia article. So for instance, wikipedians, if theres a wrestle behind every web page to go and say what fact or assertion and makes it into the article and the way that that tussle is going goes on is are do you have a good citation and can you click on it . And if we want a strong wikipedia, which in this age of disinformation, you want to go and make it so that people can click and see and reference the the claim so that it will stand up in wikipedia. Otherwise, it will just be on whatever blog posts you can get a hold of. And we know that thats being actively poisoned by very well funded institutions such as states. So, so thats thats what the internet archive is, a Research Library. So brewster carl, if ive been on wikipedia and i click one of the citations, chances are ive used the internet archive. Well, weve also fixed 17 million broken links in wikipedia. So yes, youll probably have used the wayback machine. So we go over all wikipedia, try to find the links, see which ones are either massively changed or deleted. And we fix 17 million broken links and we have now a million links in wikipedia that go to over 250,000 books, which foundations and and individual funded us to go and acquire those books and digitize them and weave them back into wikipedia to make wikipedia stronger. But its not all just wikipedia, right . We have tremendous collections of theological information because seminaries are largely becoming decentralized or going out of business. And so theyve donated a lot of theological materials, a lot of historic materials, a lot of things that are used by genealogists and the like. So thats the type of abuse that we tend to see. How do you monetize this . We dont at all. Zero, none. So we are a nonprofit. We do accept donations. So theres a little part on our archive board and about 110,000 people go and go and contribute to us. And actually more are contributing now because were being attacked by these large scale publishers and other trolls. So in the libraries are really under attack everywhere. So we have politicians advocating book bans. We have legislatures now going and defunding libraries. We have these large scale publisher core corporations, billion dollar mega corporations that are suing not just the internet archive, but they sued maryland state for going and having the audacity to to pass a law saying that publishers have to go and give reasonable licensing deals to libraries. That was so they sued maryland and theyre suing the internet archive. And so were seeing libraries under attack. And whats happening is we now have a digital world. And if you just have one copy on library, on publishers servers, they can change and delete it at any time. And thats whats happening. Its active happening. Theyve changed. Agatha christie. Jane woodhouse. Other books that you know are famous have been changed. But thousands of books from wiley were just taken off of academic bookshelves that teachers were teaching with. So we basically have a level of control that we just have never seen in the real book. You know, real book industry. Its this ebook world where its basically a netflix of books and it will tend towards just greatest hits and its not what libraries are designed and funded for. Brewster carroll this is a statement by terrence hart, the general counsel of the association of american publishers. Quote, there is simply no Legal Support for the notion that internet archive or a library may convert millions of ebooks from print books to public for public distribution without the coent of or compensation to the authors and publishers. Copyright not infringement is the engine of creativity that serves the public interest. So i dont think hes right. I mean, libraries have been doing have been buying publishers products forever, as long as there have been publishers and even before there are publishers libraries built collections and lent them out. This is the same thing in the digital world. Its very constrained. Its only one copy that is available to everyone. So its an extremely constraining and a world that has been going on now for ten years by hundreds of libraries, and especially in the beginning of the pandemic, when all the libraries closed, we had all of this investment not able to be seen in the physical form. So going in digitizing these and making them available is not only a fair use. Its good public policy. Its along the tradition of what libraries do and how libraries have supported publishers and authors forever. In the United States, where 12 billion industry are. Library system about three or 4 billion of that goes to publishers products. Its basically a social support structure for about 20 of the trade books distributed in the United States is what the Library System is. If we crush the Library System and say, you cant buy anything and you cant go and make your old even out of print works and make those available, we will see whats going on, which is people will turn on the libraries, theyll beco