by Roni Bhakta & Mek

All around the world, sidewalk libraries have been popping up and improving people’s lives, grounded in our basic right to pass along the books we own: take a book, leave a book.

As publishers transition from physical books to ebooks, they are rewriting the rules to strip away the ownership rights that make libraries possible. Instead of selling physical books that can be preserved, publishers are forcing libraries to rent ebooks on locked platforms with restrictive licenses. What is a library that doesn’t own books? And it’s not just libraries losing this right — it’s us too.

⚠️ Did you know: When a patron borrows a book from their library using platforms like Libby, the library typically pays each year to rent the ebook. When individuals purchase ebooks on Amazon/Kindle, they don’t own the book — we are agreeing to a “perpetual” lease that can’t be resold or transferred and might disappear at any moment. In 2019, Microsoft Books shut down and customers lost access to their books.

This year, Roni Bhakta, from Maharashtra, India, joined Mek from the Internet Archive’s Open Library team for Google Summer of Code 2025 to ask: how can the idea of a sidewalk library exist on the Internet?

Our response is a new open-source, free, plug-and-play “Labs” prototype called Lenny, that lets anyone, anywhere – libraries, archives, individuals – set up their own digital lending library online to lend the digital books they own. You may view Roni’s initial proposal for Google Summer of Code here. To make a concept like Lenny viable, we’re eagerly following the progress of publishers like Maria Bustillos’s BRIET, which are creating a new market of ebooks, “for libraries, for keeps“.

Design Goals

Lenny is designed to be:

• Self-hostable. Anyone can host a Lenny node with minimal compute resources.
• Easy to install. A single https://lennyforlibraries.org/install.sh install script uses Docker so Lenny works right out of the box.
• Preloaded with books. Lenny comes preloaded with over 500+ open-access books.
• Compatible with dozens of existing apps. Each Lenny uses the OPDS standard to publish its collection, so any compatible reading app (Openlibrary, Internet Archive, Moon reader and others) can be used to browse its books.

Features

Lenny comes integrated with:

• A seamless reading experience. An onboard Thorium Web EPUB reader lets patrons read digital books instantly from their desktop or mobile browsers.
• A secure, configurable lending system. All the basic options and best practices a library or individual may need to make the digital books they own borrowable with protections.
• A marketplace. Lenny is designing a connection to an experimental marketplace so one can easily buy and add new digital books to their collection.

Learn More

Lenny is an early stage prototype and there’s still much work to be done to bring the idea of Lenny to life. At the same time, we’ve made great progress towards a working prototype and are proud of the progress Roni has achieved this year through Google Summer of Code 2025.

We invite you to visit https://lennyforlibraries.org to learn more about how Lenny works and how you can try an early prototype on your personal computer.