and I found like, twelve ebooks I’ve been wanting to read on there, and blasted through like three of them during the course of a boring-ass shift.
Guy there are books on magic on there.
There’s books on EVERYTHING there!
Wouldn’t this be bad for authors though? or is this like a normal library where they get /some/ money?
It’s like a normal library. Libraries can upload ebooks there and let people check them out through openlibrary if you have an openlibrary account, or it can point you to nearby libraries that have physical copies of the book for you to go and check out. If you check out books via openlibrary it counts towards the count of books checked out from the library that uploaded the ebook, and they can use it in their reporting and funding and stuff.
There’s like 150 libraries partnered with openlibrary so far.
They also have copies that you can check out if you are print-disabled.
You can also ‘sponsor a book’, which means you pay the cost of the ebook you want openlibrary to acquire, and then they can add it to their collection and let people check it out.
And click on a title even if it says ‘no ebook available’ and scroll down, ‘cause sometimes that just means “all of the copies of ebooks are checked out right now but you can get on the waitlist when it’s back in”
This is part of the Internet Archive! I’ve posted about this before. Please go, it’s amazing.
