eBooks@Adelaide has now officially closed (adelaide.edu.au)

The Internet Archive can serve up the content via torrent natively. No need to duplicate effort.

Same, the presentation was so good. I was going to use them in some examples of good long form text sharing as it's such a strong contrast to the sh*t medium etc throw on all their content

The response to my inquiry indicates that the collection was thought redundant.

To which I replied:

John, thank you for your reponse.

I can understand the sense that you were simply providing a set of redudant and duplicate services. I do feel that's less a cardinal sin than it may at first appear.

Though it may be a lost cause, there's simply the durability of URLs, and not breaking links and bookmarks. Adelaide's decision has had widespread impacts well beyond the walls of your institution. Linkrot is a tragedy. Cool URLs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

See also Edward Tufte on the topic: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

There is also the utility of presentation. I'm not generally one to speak highly of Web design and presentation (one of my modest claims to fame is a rather salty-tongued demonstration of what I find to be good style, of which reproducable elements of the title are "Edward Morbius's Website", on CodePen). When I say that Adelaide's eBook site had remarkably good design, I really mean it. It was my first impression on encountering the site, as memorialised at Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21391464

I'm very sorry to see that gone. Thankfully the Internet Archive seem to have captured much or all of the eBooks@Adelaide site.

And yes, IA's Wayback Machine is an international treasure. I'd prefer we weren't all increasingly relying on it, however. There's no reason to give even altruistically-minded and future-minded Americans all the prizes. As an archival institution, you may appreciate the value of independent collections, widely separated. That said, I've downloaded several of the works from there for local consumption.

I'm quite familiar with Hathi Trust. Mostly for the reason that, whilst it does contain an impressive collection of works, those are all but entirely inaccessible to me.

Hathi does not allow downloads of materials, even those in the public domain. Full Hathi access is also only available via major research universities. It is not available to the general public over the Internet, or at ordinary public libraries, nor even may college and university libraries below the level of major research institutions.

In Australia that can mean full access requires travel of thousands of kilometers. In somewhat more densely populated developed-world regions (I'm constrasting density, not developedness, with Oz), that can still mean tens or hundreds of kilometers of travel, for what really ought be available as readily as Facebook, TikTok, or Reddit over any WiFi or G4 mobile link.

Hathi have even managed to take such generally exemplary tools as the Internet Archive's BookReader software (truly exceptional) and foul that up -- Hathi's online reader, where it's available, is utterly unusable, and has been for years, on mobile devices. I make heavy use of a 9.7 inch tablet, which is otherwise a serviceable e-book reader. Again: Hathi is by all appearances gratuitously incompatible.

I've lobbied both Hathi and local institutions to change this, with no success. Hathi links are an all but certain pressaging of immense frustration and disappointment.

Gutenberg on the other hand is generally more useful and is among the services I do make heavy use of. In particular, it offers the multiple formats and affordances of online HTML, multiple downloadable formats (generally: text, PDF, and ePub), and has an extensive collection. I really do appreciate that.

I'd at ...

I propose that the barrier to a citizen advocating for their government to support the Internet Archive and its endeavors is exceedingly low (through grants and other patronage mechanisms), and the only resource necessary is the time to advocate and perhaps some postage or a mobile phone for calls.

The infrastructure exists (The Archive), it just needs more support to scale for depth (storage) and breadth (distributed web for durability).

This is what the Library of Congress has been doing for at least a decade...except that it also stores the originals where possible. It is the largest library in the world in terms of physical documents (over 167 million physical documents) and one of the largest in terms of digital copies.

And not just of American works, but works from all around the globe.