No, the National Library of New Zealand isn’t Stealing Books

SF author Michael Swanwick recently posted that “New Zealand is giving away books they don’t own.” While I haven’t seen too much conversation about the New Zealand case yet, I’ve definitely seen other folks, including the authors guild and other large authors’ organizations, understandably angry and frustrated at a perceived threat to their livelihood, make similar hyperbolic, overblown, inaccurate claims in the past about library digitization programs. (For an example of a press release that presents the issue accurately and in-context, check out SFWA’s.)

I’m not here to say people are wrong to feel that way, but to say that this is not an accurate description of what’s going on. In reality, what the National Library of New Zealand is doing is donating some books it does own to the Internet Archive, which will digitize and lend them to one user at a time.

Incidentally, this post isn’t the first time the National Library of New Zealand has received negative attention for their project to deaccession a portion of their print collection–they’ve been drawing ire for it in one way or another since they announced the deaccessioning project in 2018. And the Internet Archive is definitely no stranger to controversy in the publishing world. (Vox has a good summary.)

But do authors really need to worry? Are libraries out to ruin us? Do they want us to starve while they benefit from our hard work unfairly?

In a word: no.

Super Basic Summary Version

The rest of this post is pretty long. If you don’t care that much but just want to know why people are mad and what you can do to protect your own rights, here’s a summary that covers the basics and sets right some misconceptions.

1. The National Library of New Zealand is getting rid of 428,231 books in a collection focused on authors and publishers outside New Zealand. They are not “giving away books they don’t own” because they do own these books and have purchased them. (Also, 200,000 of these are unequivocally in the public domain and only 775 titles in the list have a publication date of later than the year 2000.)

2. They are donating the books to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit focused on creating accessible digital archives of books and other forms of media. They are not digitizing the books themselves and then sending over the digital copies. Instead, the Internet Archive will take ownership of the print books.

3. The Internet Archive will digitize the books and let anybody with an account check them out. Loan periods vary, with access to downloadable files usually limited to two weeks. They are not letting anybody just download copies of the ebooks to keep. Also, during the time they are checked out nobody else will be able to access the files.

4. You can opt out of the National Library of New Zealand’s project by December 1st if your titles are affected. To check if anything of yours is in the overseas collection they are getting rid of, download this excel file from their website (warning: it is 45MB) If your title isn’t in that spreadsheet, then this won’t affect you personally and you don’t need to opt out of anything. To opt out, follow the directions here. (Basically, you just email them with the titles and their numbers on the spreadsheet and your email needs to match your author name).

5. If you miss the December 1st deadline, you can still have your materials removed from the Internet Archive, which has a takedown process detailed here.

So, what’s really going on in New Zealand?

What’s actually happening is that the National Library of New Zealand is donating deaccessioned print books (that is: books they do own and have paid for but decided they don’t need anymore) from one specific collection, the Overseas Published Collection (OPC), to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that digitizes print books and lends the virtual copies to pretty much anyone.

The overall mission of the National Library of New Zealand is like any library’s: to make sure people have access to books and other materials. In 2003, the library’s mission changed slightly. As it describes in its collections policy for the OPC, the library started to focus more on published materials that relate to New Zealand and the Pacific. The OPC, which is a more general-purpose collection that holds items published outside the country and region, doesn’t fit with their new mission so much, so they are deaccessioning the majority of it.

The titles that they’re getting rid of are going to be donated to the Internet Archive, who will digitize them and lend the digital copies to anyone with a free account. Note that lending here means that only one person can access a given title at a time, not that anybody can download the title for as long as they want.

What Books Are Affected?

According to the library’s website for the project, they are distributing almost 13,000 titles from the collection to other libraries in New Zealand as requested by those libraries. About 50,000 were also donated to a friends of the library group for a book sale.

The list of affected titles is available in a 45MB excel file from the library’s website. To put things into perspective, here’s some information on the titles it includes:

  • There are 428,231 total books
  • 258,625 titles were published before 1924, making them almost certainly in the public domain
  • Of the remaining 169,606 titles, only about 60,000 were published after 1980. If you go up to 1990, that number drops to 10,000 titles
  • I could only find three titles in the list that were published after 2010, and all of them are from 2011

A note on this: the date field is a little buggy in the provided data, which is not unusual for Excel or library cataloguing. There are quite a few dates like “19996” or “Apr 19” (which turned out to be a date from 1931), which makes it hard to get a good handle on what’s in there in a short period of time.

Someone with more free time than me or better Excel skills can probably clean up the data or even create a web interface for searching it, but for the purposes of this blog post the point is: the vast majority of titles in this collection are 40+ years old. This is definitely not some scheme to rip off a bunch of recently-published books and deny up and coming authors the royalties they would be owed.

Help! My Titles are in There and I Don’t Like It

If you find your titles in the spreadsheet and are upset by the idea that the National Library of New Zealand is going to give your books to the Internet Archive, you have until December 1st to opt out of the donation.

The procedure for this is pretty straightforward. Basically, search the Excel file for your work and get the unique number from the spreadsheet. Send this to their email address with “proof of rights” and they will process your request.

Let’s say you’re Jane Austen and you’re very upset. Here’s what the process looks like from start to finish.

Step 1: Find Your Titles

Open up the Excel file and do a find for your name (or book title).

A good tip here is to highlight the author column and search for Lastname, Firstname to weed out false positives:

Screenshot of Excel showing the "find and replace" dialogue. The search is for "Austen, Jane" and the results show 43 cells containing that data.

Now you have a list of your works.

Step 2: Get the Unique Numbers

Next, for each title you want removed, scroll over to column I, titled Our Unique Number. This is the number you need to send the library with your opt out request.

Let’s say Jane Austen doesn’t mind if they have Emma, but Pride and Prejudice? That’s right out. Here are the rows for the two copies of Pride and Prejudice in the collection. The unique number is the very last column on the right.

Screenshot of Excel showing two rows of a spreadsheet highlighted. Both rows are editions of Pride and Prejudice and contain data about the editions, including a unique number used by the National Library of New Zealand.

That screenshot’s hard to parse, so the numbers are:

995774093502836
995718743502836

Step 3: Email with the numbers and proof of rights

This sounds like the most complicated part. How do you “prove” your rights?

Fortunately, the library is not making this hard. All they want is an email sent to opcmanagement@dia.govt.nz containing the unique numbers from the spreadsheet and coming from the “persons or organisations whose names correspond with rights-holders’ names.”

So if your email is prettyunicornluvr69@yahoo.com, for instance, you might need to create a new account. Gmail lets you create free email accounts very quickly, though, so this should be pretty easy. If your name is already taken (it almost certainly is), try adding -author or -writer or something on the end. -professional is also a good one.

Jane Austen is, more’s the pity, dead.

But if she were alive today, she could create JaneAustenAuthor@gmail.com, paste her unique numbers into an email and send it off to opcmanagement@dia.govt.nz to let them know she does not want those titles sent on to the Internet Archive for digitization.

Step 4: But it’s After December 1st!

If you’ve missed the December 1st deadline to opt out but found your titles in the spreadsheet, you can still tell the Internet Archive you don’t want your stuff available for lending.

You can email info@archive.org with a DCMA takedown request and they will remove your items. This works for anything in their archives, by the way, not just books from this collection. You can even get your website unarchived if you want.

The Author’s Guild has a comprehensive guide to sending the Internet Archive a takedown request if you need more help.

The Internet Archive and “Illegal Ebooks”

If you’re an author (like me!), the idea of the Internet Archive taking books they didn’t buy and handing out illegally made digital copies to anyone who asks is alarming.

Fortunately, that’s not what’s really happening here.

In late March of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic cutting off access to libraries for many people, the IA instituted what it called the National Emergency Library, a program that allowed anyone to check out digital copies of IA-owned books without limit.

Understandably, a lot of publishers and authors were angry about this. As a result, the IA (eventually) closed down the program in June of 2020. However, they didn’t stop lending books altogether. Instead, they implemented what’s called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), a fairly new framework that libraries are using to try and loan out digitized versions of print titles they own instead of purchasing additional electronic licenses.

Before we go any further, I should clarify someting: in addition to being an author, I’m also a librarian. (There are quite a few of us author-librarians, in fact!) In my professional opinion as both a librarian and an author, the Internet Archive and digital lending in general are not the pirate-supporting catastrophe they seem to be at first glance. More on that in a moment.

The short version is that the IA only allows one person to check out each digitized title at a time, and they are only lending the same number of coipes of a title as they have print copies. If they have one print copy of your book in their collection, they will let one person borrow its digital version at a time. If they have zero print copies of your book, they can’t (and don’t) even digitize it, let alone lend it.

If you want the long version, well… keep reading.

All About Controlled Digital Lending

At the core of this controversy is a relatively new library framework for ebook management called controlled digital lending (CDL).

Although it certainly helps libraries provide digital content to their patrons without paying for expensive publisher licenses, CDL is definitely controversial in the publishing and writing worlds. This is nothing new. In fact, CDL only the latest bugbear in the ongoing smearfest between libraries and publishers over how to deal with ebooks.

If you want all the details, you can read this statement on CDL from the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). But basically, in CDL libraries digitize a copy of a print item they own and lend it to a patron on a one-to-one basis. That means CDL does not allow multiple patrons access to an item at once, in either format.

In other words, for every one copy of the print book the library owns, one patron can use the book in either print or digital form at any given time.

A similar concept has been around in libraries for ages: Interlibrary loan, or ILL. (Sorry, librarians love acronyms.)

With ILL, a library lets patrons at other libraries borrow copies of books they own. Just like CDL, there’s a one-to-one relationship. Libraries aren’t photocopying entire books and sending them to other people to do whatever with. Also like CDL, the library has to own the item. They don’t just go grab some random copy from somewhere and sneakily mail it to another library.

With CDL, libraries are not making endless digital copies of random books they don’t even own. They’re taking print copies of titles they do own and making one copy accessible in multiple formats. Only one person ever has the title at once, whether it’s the print or digital version.

It’s also important to note that, despite the claims of authors groups, CDL isn’t illegal digitization. Although I do have a good working knowledge of copyright from both my author and librarian backgrounds, I’m not a lawyer, so here’s an explainer from a pair of copyright law experts that goes into much more detail about the legal aspects of CDL.

There Is No War Between Libraries and Publishers

As a sidebar, I really hate that this is classed as a “war.” Publishers, libraries, and authors are all on the same side: we all want to connect written works with readers. Yes, there are some disagreements on the best way to do that, especially with relatively new, disruptive technologies like ebooks.

Basically, the tussle over ebook lending is best classed as growing pains. Publishers have costs they need to cover, but libraries can’t afford to pay for ebook licenses under the current models (the article linked above cites a $60 title with an ebook license that costs $240 for every 50 loans or every two years, for example, and I know from experience that if you want multiple patrons to read the book at once it gets even more expensive).

As a result, what libraries are trying is digitizing copies of books they already own and lending them to patrons that way. This isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, happening on a large scale in most places. Digitizing books takes a lot of time, and so does maintaining the digital version and the software to lend it.

Is CDL the best thing ever? I don’t think so. I don’t think any library does. It’s just the latest attempt to find a solution that respects publisher’s and author’s rights while still allowing libraries to serve the needs of patrons who can’t afford to buy their own books without using more money than they have in their own budgets.

Conclusion: Support Libraries, Support Publishers, Support Authors

New technologies are disruptive.

Although it’s odd to think of ebooks as “new,” they’re much newer than print books.

Project Gutenberg published the first ebook in 1971, but most ebook publishing didn’t catch on until the late 1990s and early 2000s at the earliest. Print books have existed in some form or another since the 9th century.

And as the ongoing debate about CDL proves, ebooks have definitely disrupted the traditional, print-based models of publishing and libraries both.

But trust me, libraries don’t want to put publishers or authors out of business (we kind of, you know, need them in order for us to exist as public storehouses of knowledge and entertainment) and no author I know of wants to shut down libraries (or at least, would ever admit it in public).

I’m not a publisher, but I’m pretty sure publishers aren’t interested in closing libraries down, either. Even those that are sometimes antagonistic toward library ebook lending understand why libraries have value and are supportive of them, generally speaking.

So, by all means, protect your rights to not have your titles digitized without your consent if you want. Get your digitized versions taken down from the Internet Archive. But please, please can we stop characterizing this as some kind of zero sum game where libraries are melodrama villains interested in twirling their moustaches while authors starve in the streets?