by Roni Bhakta & Mek

All around the world, sidewalk libraries have been popping up and improving peoples’ 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 digital ebooks, the rules are being changed and the freedom of ownership that makes libraries possible is being lost. What does it mean to be a library in a system where ebooks can’t be owned, preserved, and freely shared, but only rented on locked platforms under restrictive licenses?

⚠️ 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 — they are agreeing to a “perpetual” lease that can’t be resold or transferred and might disappear. In 2019, Microsoft Books shut down and customers lost access to their books.

This year, Roni Bhakta, from Maharashtra, India, joined the Internet Archive’s Open Library team for Google Summer of Code 2025 to explore: how can the idea of a sidewalk library exist on the Internet? You may view Roni’s initial proposal for Google Summer of Code here.

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. To make a concept like Lenny viable, we’re eagerly following the progress of publishers 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.