The Internet Archive opened its national emergency library program in March. It provided free access to 1.4 million books for people unable to get to classrooms or libraries during the coronavirus pandemic.

The emergency library is part of the open libraries initiative. The Internet Archive scans libraries’ books, allowing digital’check-outs’ via a waiting list.

The authors guild said in March that the Internet Archive was’acting as a piracy site’. That violates authors’ rights to their works.

Internet Archive is n’t completely ending the online lending program, but instead switching back to its controlled digital lending model. Internet Archive:’we moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers decided to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic’.