Archive.org has now ended their ‘extended borrow’ feature for books. For the duration of the emergency, they had made borrowing a book possible to all members, regardless of how many others had also chosen to borrow the book at the same time. The Internet Archive ‘borrow’ service is now back to the old ‘one book, one borrow’ feature, akin to a normal public membership library that only has paper books. The mega-publishers would like you to think that the ending of it was due to Archive.org being ‘frightened off’ by their new law-suit. But this return to a ‘normal library’ approach was always planned, once the emergency period was over.

Archive.org has even added a useful new feature to ‘Borrow’. One that brings them more into line with the practice of Google Books, and with public libraries where one might take a book off the shelf and flip through it. On many books the potential borrower now gets a full-page preview of the page on which your search-hit occurs. This is potentially very useful for researchers who find the book is in high demand from borrowers. Hopefully someone will code a UserScript to place a ‘see this same page on Google Books’ link adjacent to the page preview. Thus potentially giving the researcher more free pages either side.