Archive.org it offers free access and free to 1.4 million books (nearly 19,000 of them in Spanish)

The Internet Archive, the organization dedicated to save copies of the contents of the World Wide Web to avoid losing in the future, launched for already 9 years OpenLibrary.org, a service that sought to extend to to e-books, the traditional model of lending libraries.

But now that millions of people around the world are held because of the coronavirus, the Internet Archive has announced its decision to create the ‘National Emergency Library’ (Archive.org/NEL), which will access to 1.4 million books from the Open Library, by suspending the waiting lists currently in force in the processes of loan. Such suspension will be extended until the 30th of June (or beyond, if the national emergency in the united States was extended beyond).

A library open to all the world, with 19,000 books in Spanish

With that free access to 1.4 million books (a figure which, they promise, will grow in the next few weeks), the responsible of the Internet Archive and the university libraries collaborate to help all the readers who lack access to local libraries.

As explained in your blogin the selection of those 1.4 million books have been privileged titles published throughout the XX century, that lack of ebook official, because they are the most difficult to achieve through other means.

In the words of Brewster Kahle, Digital Library of the Internet Archive,

“The system of libraries, due to our national emergency, comes to the rescue of all those who are forced to learn from their homes. This was our dream when the Internet was born: a Library within the reach of all”.

Despite the references to the american context, the Internet Archive makes it clear in his statement that this ‘library’ emergency will be at the fingertips of users around the world.

And if you ask for the language you say that, as sospechabas, the vast majority of the books available in this initiative are written in the language of Shakespeare, but that even so 18.979 of them are in Spanish, 25.964 in chinese, 22.726 in French, 13.121 in German, etc

Image | CIA

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The news

Archive.org offers free access and free to 1.4 million books (nearly 19,000 of them in Spanish)

it was originally published in

Engadget

by
Marcos Merino

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