Many people think of the Internet Archive as just the Wayback Machine or just one collection or another, but there is much more. For instance, books!
As a nonprofit library we buy and lend books to the public, but we do even more than that. Working with hundreds of libraries, we buy ebooks, digitize physical books, offer them to the print-disabled, and lend books to one reader at a time, all for free via archive.org and openlibrary.org.
Archive.org is the website that offers free public access to all sorts of materials uploaded by users, collected by the Internet Archive, and digitized by the Internet Archive. Archive.org includes books, music, video, webpages, and software. OpenLibrary.org, a site that is maintained by the Internet Archive, is a catalog of books with the mission to buy sales lead offer “One webpage for every book.” This open source catalog site, started in 2005, is editable by its users and has many code contributors. It links to various resources about that book, for instance, links to amazon.com and betterworldbooks.org to buy the book, to local libraries that own the book, to archive.org for print-disabled access or to borrow a digitized version of the book, and to other sites that have digital versions.
The goals of libraries are preservation and access. For physical books, we buy and receive donations of hundreds of thousands of books that we preserve for the long term in archival, non-circulating stacks. Support for this comes from libraries, used book vendors, foundations, and tens of thousands of individual donors to the Internet Archive, a public charity.
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