points by martin-adams 13 hours ago | 0 comments
The important thing here is that the British Library has a copy of all the published books, magazines, etc from the UK.
When I self published my book with a physical print, I was required to submit a copy to them free of charge. Which I’m proud to have contributed to. Naturally I don’t want it accessible to all, hence the reading room requirement.
I remember them launching the web archive as an extension of this as a lot of human knowledge has moved online. So yes it feels weird you can only retrieve it from their reading room, but in the context of them having access to physical copyrighted material, it does make more sense.
This illegal non compliance becomes much more common in expensive books, digital-only publishers and in data publications which are commercial.
E.g. think of some very expensive report on data centres aimed at the hedge fund trading market, government procurement datasets, geodemographic data, credit risk databases, bloomburg trading data etc.
If it's published, even if it costs a lot, it should all be viewable for free in the library.