Small Moves: Open Library Integrates Digital Lending

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Today, the Internet Archive is pleased to announce 2 new borrowing options through Open Library:

  1. Borrowing ebooks through OverDrive – an ebook through your local library
    We have worked with the team at OverDrive to import about 70,000 new ebook editions into Open Library. All loans via OverDrive are managed through the OverDrive system. Once you click on borrow for these titles, you’ll need to tell OverDrive where you are so it can find your local library.

    Want to try a search through the OverDrive titles?

  2. Borrowing Scanned Books through participating libraries – an ebook to you, anywhere in the world
    Three long-time Internet Archive library partners are now offering scanned books from their collections for loan through Open Library. Boston Public Library, the Biblioteca Ludwig von Mises at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Wood’s Hole as well as the Internet Archive itself are proud to make around 200 titles available for loan as ebooks through Open Library.

    You’ll need to download the free Adobe® Digital Editions software to manage borrowing scanned books.

  3. Borrowing Physical Books through WorldCat– from your local library
    Since Open Library was launched back in 2007, we’ve added links wherever possible into the WorldCat catalog, which you can search using your location to find a copy of the book near you.

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Donate a book to the Book Drive!

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The Internet Archive is having an old-fashioned Book Drive to gather donations to supplement our digital book archive. If you post a book (or three) to the Internet Archive Book Drive, 300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118, we’ll scan it and add it to the Archive. Thanks to existing foundation funding, we are also sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books that are donated in this Book Drive. We are also seeking financial support to continue the scanning operations that the Internet Archive has been doing for some years now.

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Over 1 Million Digital Books Now Available Free to the Print-Disabled

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More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, today the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books – from classic 19th Century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials – now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or otherwise visually impaired.

Read the full press release on archive.org

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Relaunch is complete!

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Hello! Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just begun the process of launching our redesigned Open Library site. This may mean that there are a few hiccups along the way, but we hope to be through the woods as soon as possible.

We’ll post back here as soon as it’s stable, and in the meantime, If you spot anything obviously broken or weird, please leave us a comment.

Update, 6:56PM: OK. It’s been about 3 hours since we flipped the switch, and the new site seems to be holding together. Yay! We’ll be posting more about the redesign over the coming days – there are a ton of changes we’d like to highlight specifically, like the fact that we’ve shifted to using CC0 for any edits made to the records on Open Library.

Please be aware there are a few features which have been put on ice temporarily  – full text search and managing the site in multiple languages for example. We want to devote proper attention to improving those features as soon as we can. They will return!

More to come…

Open Library URLs are changing

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We are in the process of upgrading the openlibrary.org website to include the new functionality.

As part of this upgrade, the URLs of the openlibrary.org website will change from /a/, /b/, /l/ and /user/ to /authors/, /books/, /languages/ and /people/ respectively. After this change, the old URLs will get redirected to the new ones.

We are not anticipating any downtime during this process. However, there could be momentary failures in loading some pages.

We’ll post here once the change is over.