• More than 500,000 books have been taken out of lending as a result of Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged books.

Books that are shown as “Borrow Unavailable” mean they cannot be borrowed by our patrons, including books you may have previously read or consulted. 

In 2020, our library was sued by four of the world’s largest publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley—for lending books via the library practice known as controlled digital lending. That lawsuit, Hachette v. Internet Archive, is currently on appeal after the lower court (the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York) heard the case and ruled in favor of the publishers. In this decision against our library, Judge Koeltl issued an injunction that limits what we can do with our digitized books—namely, we can no longer lend those books to our patrons. The injunction does not affect our accessibility program—the removed books are still available to patrons with print disabilities.

Additionally, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade organization behind the lawsuit, worked with some of its member publishers (listed below) that were not named in the lawsuit to demand that we remove their books from our library.

As a result, more than 500,000 books in our collection are not currently available for borrowing, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged books. We understand that this is a devastating loss for our patrons. Fortunately, other countries and international library organizations are moving to support controlled digital lending. For inquiries, please contact patron services at info@archive.org.

Plaintiff Publishers

• Hachette Book Group
• HarperCollins
• Penguin Random House
• Wiley

Other Publishers Coordinated by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)

• American Chemical Society
• American Reading Company
• BiggerPockets Publishing
• Bloomsbury
• Bookpress Publishing
• Cambridge University Press
• Chronicle Books
• De Gruyter
• Elsevier
• Fordham University Press
• Getty Publications
• Hansen Publishing Group
• Harvard University Press
• Holiday House-Peachtree-Pixel+Ink
• Imbrifex Books
• Lynne Rienner Publishers
• Macmillan
• MedMaster
• Melville House Publishing
• Moody Publishers
• Pearson
• Princeton University Press
• Sage Publications
• Scholastic
• Simon & Schuster
• Springer
• Taylor & Francis
• Teacher Created Materials
• The American University in Cairo Press
• University of California Press
• University of Chicago Press
• University of Massachusetts Press
• University of Minnesota Press
• University of Texas Press
• University of Wisconsin Press
• University Press of Colorado
• Valancourt Books
• W. W. Norton & Company
• Wesleyan University Press
• Wolters Kluwer
• Yale University Press

You can read about the launch of this feature on the Open Library blog. If you would like more technical details, you can visit github.

Open Library Explorer allows you to scan bookshelves left to right by subject, up and down for subclassifications. When a title catches your eye, click on the book to see whether there is an edition you can preview or borrow.

Not all of the books available through Open Library Explorer are borrowable. If you would like to limit your exploration to available ebooks, you can turn that feature on in the filter menu.

A tour of Open Library Explorer’s features

The Open Library Explorer presents you with tall, clickable bookshelves situated across your screen. Each shelf has its own identity that can morph into new classes of books and subject categories with a single click.

In addition to those smart filters, you can personalize single rows of books, expand entire shelves, or construct an entire library experience that evolves around your exact interests. 

You can zoom out of the Open Library Explorer interface to see more shelves and get a complete view of the library you’ve constructed.

Let’s explore one more set of features the Open Library Explorer offers by clicking on the “Filter” icon at the bottom of the page.

By selecting “Juvenile,” you can instantly transform your entire library into a children’s library, but keep all the useful organization and structure provided by the bookshelves. Or you may type in “subject:biography” and suddenly your entire library shows you a tailored collection of just biographies on every subject. 

Also in the Filter menu, you can choose to show only books that have ebooks and previews available from Internet Archive by using the “Has ebook/preview” filter.

If you click on the Settings tab, you’re given several options to customize the look and feel of your personal Open Library Explorer. You can switch between using Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal classification to organize your shelves. You can also choose from a variety of delightful options to see your books in 3D. Each book has the correct thickness determined by its actual number of pages. To see your favorite book in 3D, click the settings icon at the bottom of the screen and then press the 3D button.

2. You can read the book directly online by clicking on the cover.

3. There are three ways to turn the pages and navigate through the book.

4. To view the book in full screen, click on the expand icon  in the bottom right-hand corner.

5. If you want to exit full screen, click on the x in the bottom right-hand corner.

How do I enlarge a book on my mobile device

For mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets the controls for the bookreader are found by clicking the “hamburger” (three horizontal lines) icon in the upper left side.

To enlarge the text follow these steps:

1. Use the fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower navigation bar

2. Click the “hamburger icon in the upper right

3. Click the “Settings” link

4. Click the zoom magnifier icon to enlarge the text

How do I view the PDF books?

Usually, you can click the PDF link and it will open in your browser.

Otherwise, you should download the pdf file and read it on your device using a reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader.

How do I read the books in other formats, like ePub, Mobi, PDF?

• ePub is an open textual format (not images of pages). Many readers are available. A free one is from Adobe.
• Mobi is a proprietary textual format from Amazon supported on the Kindle.

Tips for uploading scanned books and other text documents

• Scan individual pages rather than spreads.
• PDF is the easiest format to use for uploading books.
• Use hi-res files (we use 600 ppi). Add _images.zip to uploaded zip files that contain images. png, jpg, jp2 and tif files are the accepted formats.
• For file names, use only unaccented Roman letters, numbers, dashes, underscores, and spaces.
• Keep file names to under 100 characters.
• When uploading multiple books to a single page, prepend the file names with numbers to force the list order you would like to see. e.g. use 01, 02, 03, etc.
• Always specify the language so OCR can run correctly. if there is more than one language, add additional metadata field for each additional language.
• Include as much metadata as possible such as date (published), creator (author), ISBN and LCCN numbers (add a metadata field for these), description, subject tags, creative commons license, etc.
• For the title field, use the title as it is shown on the title page of the book. That is how the system tries to choose the title page to display in the preview and in search results.
• If possible, upload a MARC file along with your book file. The name is the same as the book file and, depending on the MARC file format, end with _marc.xml or _meta.mrc. For example, a book file named mybook.pdf would have a MARC file named mybook_marc.xml.
• Upload books to the Community Texts collection if you do not have a private collection. If you feel the book should be in another collection, please contact us at info@archive.org with that request. Collections can be created on request when you have created at least 50 item pages on archive.org.

What file format should I upload?

A hi-res pdf is the easiest format to upload. To upload image files, read the How do I make a flip book out of loose images section.

How do I make a flipbook out of loose images?

To make a flipbook, you need to upload a zip or tar that contains the files.

Here’s how:

1. Use only jpg, jpeg, jp2, tif, tiff, png, gif or bmp files. Any combination of them is acceptable.
2. Name your files sequentially. It is best to use the identifier in the name. For example:

• 000yourfilename.jpg
• 001yourfilename.jpg
• 002yourfilename.jpg

3. Create a zip or tar of the files and name that zip file using the page identifier e.g. yourfilename_images.zip or yourfilename_images.tar. If possible, use a compression tool that does not add extra extraneous files. Sometimes the compression tool that comes with your computer does this (as with the Mac tool for example.) Terminal or Cygwin work well.
4. Upload the zip or tar file. Be sure to specify a language to help OCR. The system should do the rest. (Tip: If your images don’t result in a flip book embedded in the page, click Edit in the item and make sure the zip or tar file format is listed as “Generic Raw Book Zip.”)

Can I upload a MARC record?

• You can upload a MARC record with your text file.
• The MARC record will populate the item as soon as the item derives if the MARC file is named correctly.
• If it’s a binary (ISO 2709) MARC, it should be called {itemID}_meta.mrc.
• If it’s MARCXML, it should be called {itemID}_marc.xml.

Hi-resolution originals are always preferred.

We scan at 600dpi.

How do I embed a book?

On the item details page, click the Share icon.

A pop-up window will offer URLs for embedding.

For more advanced options click the Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! link at the bottom of the pop-up for more information.

How do I link to a book?

1. On the item details page click the share icon
2. A popup window will appear with several share options.

3. Select your preferred method of sharing (for example, FaceBook) and a link will automatically be generated.

Where are the hi-res images in an item?

All files for an item can be found on the ALL FILES page.

For books scanned by the Internet Archive, the largest compressed (tar or zip) file holds the original scans. You can usually download this file, expand it and use the images.

Where are the thumbnail images?

1. In the book reader, click the thumbnails icon at the bottom of the page.

You will be able to view the book in thumbnails.

How do I make books flip right to left?

You can make books flip right to left by adding a metadata pair, page-progression=rl.

Use this click path starting at your item page:

Edit > change the information > Add another field > type page-progression in the left box and rl in the right box > click the Submit button.

How do I report that something’s wrong with a book?

Please send a description of the problem along with the URL of the page to info@archive.org. Thank you.

Please be aware that we typically do not modify the metadata of an item that has been created by a user of the site except at their request.

We recommend leaving a review on the page explaining the issue.

The uploader will automatically be notified.

For volume and serial work, the publish date often appears to be incorrect. This is because the metadata is populated by a MARC record from one of our partner libraries such as the Library of Congress. At this time, volume and serial works are considered to be a single work so there is a single MARC record for it. Typically the date that the first volume was published, is the only date in the record, so that is the date that will appear on all volumes of the work regardless of the date that might be printed in a particular volume.

Why won’t my uploaded file create a flip book?

There are a variety of reasons that your uploaded file(s) may not have properly created the files necessary for the online book reader such as, but not limited to:

1. If you uploaded individual scan files, they may not have been properly formatted into a compressed file that is named [identifier]_images.zip (where [identifier] is the identifier of your item page.)
2. The file(s) uploaded are corrupt or unreadable.
3. The number of pages is too large and the derive task times out.
4. The file name includes special characters or accented letters (please only use plain text, numbers, dashes and underscores for file names.)
5. The uploaded pdf file is missing the format extension in the file name.
6. The language is missing from the item’s metadata and the OCR module requires it.
7. The derive task queue is backed up (please be patient).
8. The dimensions in the pdf are not correct or within the acceptable size range.

Why is the OCR so bad? Why do the epub, mobi, text files have garbled or missing text?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is inexact. Sometimes it can be poor. It largely relies on factors of the physical book such as type font, color, cleanliness of the page, language (some are not OCRable at this time), and page orientation (sometimes charts are turned at 90°).

At this time we do not offer a way for you to either correct bad OCR or add your own corrected OCR file.

Several of the derived file formats such as mobi, EPUB and DjVu rely on OCR. So, if the OCR is poor, those files will also have garbled or misspelled words.

ReadAloud (Text-to-speech)

Why are the voices available for ReadAloud in the BookReader low quality?

The voices that BookReader uses for ReadAloud depend on the browser and computer you’re using. Different operating systems and browsers make different voices available. And you can also install more voices into your operating system.

• Windows: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have the best voices.
• Apple/Mac: All browsers have good voice options.
• Linux: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have the best voice options. Firefox and other browsers rely on voices available to the operating system. Generally, few voices are included out of the box so you will have to install some voices if you want to use these browsers.
• Android: All browsers have good voice options.
• iPad/iPhone: All browsers have good voice options.

How can I install more voice options for ReadAloud?
On Windows, you can install new voices / languages for use in BookReader.

• Windows: Download languages and voices for Immersive Reader, Read Mode, and Read Aloud – Microsoft Support
• Apple/Mac: Add a new voice to speak text to your Mac – Apple Support
• Linux: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge have the best voice options. Firefox and other browsers rely on voices available to the operating system. Generally, few voices are included out of the box so you will have to install some voices if you want to use these browsers.