Also fairly hidden these days is Many-to-Many (also sometimes referred to as Many2Many) http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corant... where Clay Shirky, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet, David Weinberger and danah boyd posted.
This is terrible. But the upside is that most of them have really good books you can still buy on Amazon, so if not the actual historical essays then at least most of their ideas will be preserved indefinitely.
Clearly a lot of them have been looking back at that period with mixed feelings over the last few years (and have said as much), but even still it's shocking that something like Clay Shirky's blog would disappear when he's very much still alive. The fact that we apparently now have to worry about whether or not something like Danah Boyd's MySpace vs Facebook essay could disappear though is ridiculous; even with all the known technical and social problems with the web it's hard to imagine that it's come to this.
> But the upside is that most of them have really good books you can still buy on Amazon
I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively scan and archive books, even if they don't share them because of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when it comes to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the books for the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy is guaranteed to be around by then.
In addition to the national libraries, it's extremely common for librarians and archivists to keep things in a personal collection on the DL regardless of copyright.
I have every ROM released for pre-2000 consoles + a ton of old software, OSes, and PC games on hard drives that I keep backed up. I have friends who prefer to specialize in keeping/archiving zines. Someone else does fanmade ROMs. Etc. Most of us have a good understanding of copyright law even where we disagree with it, and it's common to archive 'grey' material off the record and then fight for the right to make it official.
Books are even easier than digital assets since the laws around book archiving and preservation are much kinder to archivists. So yes, there are definitely DRM-free, digital copies of MOST books floating around and will continue to be for quite some time. The main issue is whether or not we'll be prosecuted if we open up our personal archives or distribute them.
> I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively scan and archive books, even if they don't share them because of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when it comes to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the books for the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy is guaranteed to be around by then.
The University of Michigan and Google Books have something like this, at least for the UM library: https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/google-set... . I can't find much about whether it stopped completely, or just went quiet, after the lawsuits.
Sweden has the Royal Library, US has the Library of Congress. I believe most developed countries have national libraries, archiving books and newspapers as they are published.
