How the Internet Archive is putting publishers to shame
Anyone interested in developing a deep understanding of Botticelli’s great mythological works simply must read Charles Dempsey’s 1992 classic, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, where the author expertly weaves together an intriguing range of captivating strands, from love poetry to rustic songs to civic festivals, in order to provide the reader with the necessary cultural context to not only better appreciate Botticelli, but late Quattrocento Florence in general.
I know this because I’ve read it. But not without an enormous struggle. Not to go through it, you understand—it is, as it happens, a particularly well-written book—just to get a hold of it. I first tried ordering it from Amazon, where I was informed that it was available, in used paperback (i.e. with only some “moderate writing in it”), for a whopping 50 euros. Well, I thought to myself, it’s a classic text so I should really buy it. But after six weeks of waiting, Amazon mysteriously canceled my order, as not infrequently happens, and I was forced to seek alternatives.
Fortunately, a tried and true option was available to me: the Internet Archive (IA). For those of you who haven’t yet discovered it, the IA is a remarkable development: a not-for-profit initiative that makes it possible, through the spontaneous efforts of countless thoughtful and dedicated people worldwide, to freely read millions of works of research and scholarship that can be “borrowed” one hour at a time.
It’s the sort of inspiring cultural preservation and dissemination initiative that, back when the internet was first being developed, we all idealistically predicted would happen but almost never did, as our collective societal attention became fixated on the likes of pornography, video games and social media (if not all three simultaneously).
The Internet Archive, however, is, thankfully, the exception that proves the rule: a tangible demonstration that no matter how bleakly trivial and mercenary our contemporary societal landscape might become, there are still millions out there quietly doing their best to enhance our rapidly evolving notion of community by making high-quality ideas broadly available to the widest possible public.
For my part, I must confess, I am much more of a user than a contributor, having depended on it countless times over the past few years while researching my documentaries on Raphael and the cultural history of chess—so much so that I’ve started to explicitly include the IA in my films’ credits, given that I simply can’t envision making them without it.
Unfortunately, however, I might soon be forced to. Because the Internet Archive is now under serious threat, having been successfully sued for copyright infringement by a broad coalition of publishers including Princeton University Press, the publishers of Dempsey’s landmark work.
When I tried to access it on the Internet Archive, it was duly there, but no longer available to read, one of some half a million works forcibly rendered inaccessible to the global community after the March 2023 New York court decision that ruled in favor of the publishers. The case is now under appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, with a decision expected later this fall or early 2025.
The precise legal details are, as you would expect, somewhat abstruse, involving nuanced debates on the notions of “fair use” and “controlled digital lending”, but the basic concepts at play are very straightforward. The publishers are arguing that, through the copyright-infringing actions of the IA, they are suffering considerable economic harm; and believe that the IA represents a pernicious “thin edge of the wedge” that is nothing short of an existential threat to the publishing industry as a whole.
Let’s examine each of these points in turn.
1. The amount of economic harm that the publishers are presently suffering as a result of the IA has not only never been quantified, it has not even been roughly attempted to be quantified. And it is most difficult to coherently argue with someone who is crying out that their livelihood is being threatened by a particular situation when they don’t provide one iota of tangible evidence that such a thing is actually occurring.
Personally, my suspicion is that the net financial damage to the publishers due to the actions of the IA is so low as to not even make it to the level of rounding errors on their balance sheets; and while you might well wonder why you should listen to someone as obviously ignorant as me on this matter, it’s once again worth stressing that, since the publishers never provided any concrete details, my guess is literally as good as anyone else’s.
2. Copyright belongs, properly, to the author of a work. And while some authors might well feel that the publishers engaged in this lawsuit are directly aligned with their creative interests, a great many do not.
In particular, in a recent amicus brief to support the efforts of the Internet Archive in their appeal (see here and here), the Authors Alliance maintained that the IA not only plays a key role in preserving and enhancing access to authors’ work, by doing so it also helps establish the conditions for additional valuable work to be produced.
This Authors Alliance—another uplifting, right-thinking organization of which you’ve likely never heard—is a broad coalition of academics, librarians and scholars dedicated to advancing the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations more broadly and promoting policies that make knowledge and culture available and discoverable.
And in their amicus brief they make some very interesting, and highly relevant, points about how the publishing industry is currently structured, describing how the vast majority of authors never receive more than the relatively meager “advances” the publishers offer them for their books, a fact which makes it very hard to take seriously the claim that publishers are vigilant defenders of authors’ proprietary and financial interests.
But beyond that lurks an even more significant point that seems to have escaped the recent short-sighted ruling of Justice John G. Koeltl: virtually all authors who produce leading scholarly and cultural works do not write them to make buckets of money. They write them to be read. Which, in turn, makes them deeply unsympathetic to the attitudes of their greedy publishers who are doing everything in their power to gravely limit their accessibility under the hypocritical guise of “fighting for authors’ rights”.
3. Which brings me, finally, to the “thin edge of the wedge” argument—where, you might be surprised to discover, I am actually quite sympathetic to the publishers’ concerns. Because I truly believe that in a reasonable world, the existence of organizations like the Internet Archive would indeed represent an existential threat to the publishing industry, particularly its tiny academic subsection.
But where I significantly part company with the publishers is that I happen to regard that as a very good thing indeed.
In the old days before the rise of our present digital world—say 40–50 years ago or so—there was a clear understanding that the act of publishing an academic book was a considerable financial investment that required significant commitment and expertise and thus could reasonably justify the current economic model where the publisher receives the lion’s share of any future revenue.
In an age when authors would routinely send in poorly-typed manuscripts (or, worse still, hand-written notes) to be rigorously typeset, indexed, and transformed into legible, professional-quality final works, publishers were universally recognized to be an integral part of the creation process—often, in fact, considerably transcending mere production logistics, given that several seminal books only came about through the dedicated efforts of far-sighted editors who proactively approached top scholars and worked closely with them to ensure that the final work saw the light of day.
Nowadays, however, it is a very different story. Authors are often expected to provide their own “camera-ready” copy, typically in the publisher’s preferred software, and perform their own marketing, with many routinely opting to hire a publicist or two for good measure out of their own pocket.
If you ask most scholars what, exactly, is the “value add” that an academic publisher is offering them these days, most would understandably draw a blank. The simple truth is that scholarly publishing is simply riding on its past inertia. And inertia is a terrible justification for anything (beyond basic Newtonian mechanics, of course). It’s high time to blow the whole thing up and start over.
Again, my ire here is directed not at those who manufacture airport thrillers or mystery novels—entertainment products that are appropriately governed solely by the ebb and flow of market forces—but those who claim to be involved in the creation of works of significant cultural and research significance that represent a genuine societal benefit for both the short and long term. Organizations, in other words, like Princeton University Press, the publishers of Dempsey’s 1992 classic I began this essay with.
If you go to the PUP website, you will discover their official reaction to the March 2023 ruling of Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive (see here), a breathtaking concatenation of sanctimonious hypocrisy (the Internet Archive represents “a fundamental devaluation of authors’ and publishers’ intellectual and creative investments”), and scaremongering irrelevancy (“With censorship of books on the rise globally, ensuring the viability of the creative economy has never felt more urgent”), that goes a considerable distance to convincing any objective observer that the powers that be at Princeton University Press—a non-profit, I’m told—have clearly not benefited from the many intellectual-sharpening opportunities on offer throughout nearby Princeton University.
It’s time for a change.
Howard Burton, September 2, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and the creator of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023) and Raphael: A Portrait (2024).
