• 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

The Internet Archive will be part of a team that is working to address a key challenge for students with disabilities: getting books in accessible formats. This participation aligns with an existing Internet Archive program to make materials available and accessible to readers with disabilities.

The number of students with disabilities at colleges and universities has grown over the past few decades. Many of those students have print disabilities, including the largest subgroup, those with learning differences.  Students with print disabilities require text to be reformatted for screen readers, text-to-speech software, or other forms of audio delivery, often with human intervention. Universities are required to perform this reformatting on request but are rarely staffed to do that work at scale and this type of reformatting and remediation can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Once the work has been done for a student at one university, the reformatted book is almost never made available for use by students with disabilities at other universities.  Without collaboration and coordination across campuses efforts are wasted and students with disabilities often wait weeks to get texts in a form they can access and use.

A newly-funded pilot project, “Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education,” aims to address this problem. This is a two-year pilot program that has recently been funded by a $1,000,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Virginia (as principal investigator) with a primary goal of reducing the duplication of remediation activity across the seve (7) universities participating in the pilot. It will also support the cumulative improvement of accessible texts and decrease the turnaround time for delivering those texts to students and faculty.

Within this program, the Internet Archive will participate as one of several repositories of digitized books, both to provide initial digital copies (for remediation) and to receive and hold remediated book files. Those improved books can then be shared with other schools and organizations that provide services to people with disabilities. They may also be used as a starting point for further conversion into additional formats (such as Braille) that may be needed to support specific reader needs.

The Internet Archive’s role in this pilot project dovetails with our existing program to make materials available and accessible to readers with disabilities. Our current program allows any organization that is already working with people with disabilities, known as Qualifying Authorities, to access the digital files of over 1.8 million books (about 900,000 of which are otherwise unavailable). Those Qualifying Authorities, especially Disability Student Service teams at colleges and universities, are then able to streamline their preparation and remediation of these digital books for people with print disabilities. Because they work directly with individual readers, Qualifying Authorities are also able to enable existing (and qualified) Internet Archive users for an account with disability access. With that access, these users can enjoy expanded and immediate access to the Internet Archive’s full collection of books (through archive.org or OpenLibrary).

We are excited to participate in and support the wider community of teams working to make books accessible for all. 

The Internet Archive strives for AA-level WCAG compliance to ensure the accessibility of the site to users on a variety of platforms and devices, including screen readers.

Books and text content available to people with print disabilities:

• Unencrypted text DAISY files for books that are in the public domain
• All books can be read in a browser user on our online Book Reader.  This online reader has both magnification and text-to-speech capabilities. Public-domain books are immediately accessible in the Book Reader.  Modern books must be borrowed or accessed under special disability access before they are fully available in the Book Reader.  
• Modern books are also available to be borrowed and downloaded using Controlled Digital Lending. Once borrowed, a modern book can be opened on a user’s desktop, laptop or mobile device, so long as the device has LCP software such as Thorium (desktop), Cantook (iOS) or Cantook (Android) already installed.
• Content-related limitations:  Please be aware that there are some unusual cases when books or texts that have been uploaded to the Internet Archive will not be converted into a text. If there is a critical item in which you encounter this situation, please contact info@archive.org to get help with access.  

Other resources for people with disabilities

Librivox Audio

Bookshare

Learning Ally

BARD (National Library Service)