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A comment on Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit. Parent comment

Re:Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit by tgsovlerkhgsel on Thursday July 30, 2020 @05:25PM (#24003007)
It would be interesting to look into that. Would be funny if it turned out they still had more physical copies of the most popular book than they had digital lendings - it'd kinda confirm that the right move was to throw out the limits, because the need was there now, and the counting would take months.

Did they publish stats how often their most popular books were borrowed?

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Re:Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit by icebraining on Friday July 31, 2020 @06:48AM (#24007400)
> the counting would take months.

Don't libraries know the books they own? That seems unlikely, since they need to know that when they lend them out.

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Re:Internet Archive responds to publishers’ lawsuit by tgsovlerkhgsel on Monday August 03, 2020 @06:22PM (#24044173)
Each library does, but unless they already all use the same software and have someone who knows it well enough to export the data and they have the time to do it, I suspect it would take a long time to collate the data in a useful form. And that assumes the books are keyed by some kind of unique ID like an ISBN in all libraries, otherwise good luck collating the different spelling/typos of titles.

Just reaching out to all the libraries and getting them to submit the data would take a lot of time.

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