+++
title = "Shadow libraries"
has_shards = ["subversionofcopyright.md", "privatization.md", "guerillaopenaccess.md"]
+++

The transition from print distribution to digital networks has enormously expanded the accessibility of cultural works and science. However, in that expansion of accessibility, public libraries, the central institutions of organizing knowledge and providing access to knowledge in the age of print, were denied from doing with "digital" objects what they were tasked to do with "print" objects. Because of the self-interested concerns of copyright holders, [until the mid-2010s libraries were excluded from lending digital works](http://www.ala.org/news/2012/09/open-letter-america%E2%80%99s-publishers-ala-president-maureen-sullivan) and, thus, platforms that have taken on the task of organizing and facilitating access to digital works for commercial purposes, such as Google and Amazon, have captured that central position. Centralized digital platforms and copyright monopolies, erstwhile arch enemies, have then gradually come to a marriage of interest, creating a new cultural and knowledge industry of subscription access that actively denies the expanded digital access to culture and knowledge to a large part of the world.

In response to that denial, readers across the world have taken to digitizing and sharing digital texts themselves, creating their own piratical systems of access. These systems are called shadow libraries and can be regarded as a form of pirate care in its own right. While mass copying of texts is nothing specific to the age of digital networks — in earlier decades, texts found their shadowy ways of circulation through photocopies or floppy-disk copying, the scale of sharing and the ability to organize texts into large collections has allowed shadow libraries to do what public libraries were not allowed to do. In doing so, shadow libraries and shadow librarians have been articulating a politics of mass disobedience with the system of denial.