Can You Download Borrow-Only Books from Internet Archive?
If you have tried to download a book from archive.org and found a Borrow button instead of a Download button, you have encountered the Internet Archive's lending library. These books are not freely downloadable — they are digital loans, modeled after how a physical library works. Understanding the system saves confusion and helps you know what is actually possible.
How the lending library works
The Internet Archive's Open Library operates a digital lending program. When you borrow a book, you get temporary access — either a one-hour loan for online reading only, or a fourteen-day loan that allows both online reading and downloading an encrypted copy. You need a free archive.org account to borrow. The system enforces a limit of ten borrowed books at a time. There are no late fees — loans expire automatically — but there is no renewal either. If you need the book again after it expires, you borrow it again. If all copies are currently borrowed by other users, you join a waitlist.
Can you download a borrowed book?
The short answer: only with restrictions, and only on a fourteen-day loan. One-hour loans are strictly online — you read in the browser through the Archive's BookReader interface and cannot download anything. Fourteen-day loans allow you to download the book as an LCP-encrypted PDF or LCP-encrypted EPUB. LCP stands for Licensed Content Protection, a DRM standard. The downloaded file works in compatible reading apps — Thorium on desktop, Cantook on iOS and Android, or Adobe Digital Editions — but stops working when the loan expires. You cannot convert these files to unprotected formats, and Kindle devices are not directly supported due to Amazon's proprietary DRM.
What is Controlled Digital Lending?
The legal theory behind the lending library is called Controlled Digital Lending, or CDL. The idea is that a digitized copy of a book is treated as equivalent to its physical counterpart. If the Internet Archive owns one print copy, it can lend one digital copy at a time. If it owns ten copies, it can lend up to ten. DRM enforces the one-copy-one-loan ratio. This treats the digital library like a physical library — when all copies are checked out, the next person waits. The theory was developed by legal scholars and adopted by several institutions, though it has always been controversial with publishers.
What happened with the Hachette lawsuit
In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library, temporarily removing waitlists so multiple users could read the same book simultaneously. Three months later, four major publishers — Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley — sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement. In March 2023, a federal judge ruled against the Archive on all four fair use factors. A settlement followed: the Archive agreed to a permanent injunction preventing it from lending the plaintiffs' books via CDL, except for titles without a currently available e-book edition. An appeal to the Second Circuit in September 2024 upheld the lower court's ruling. In December 2024, the Internet Archive announced it would not petition the Supreme Court, ending the legal fight.
What this means now
Over 500,000 books were removed from the lending library as a result of the lawsuit and settlement. The Archive honors publisher removal requests from members of the Association of American Publishers. Books without commercially available e-book editions may still be lendable under the settlement terms, but the overall catalog is significantly smaller than it was before 2020. The Internet Archive continues to operate its lending library in a reduced capacity.
What you can actually do
If the book you want shows a Borrow button: create a free account, borrow it for fourteen days, and download the LCP-encrypted version if you need offline access. Read it in Thorium, Cantook, or Adobe Digital Editions. If the book is not available for borrowing at all — no Borrow button, no waitlist — it may have been removed under the settlement, or it may not be in the lending program for other rights reasons. In that case, check your local public library's digital lending service (OverDrive, Libby, or Hoopla), which may have the same title available through a licensed channel.
For freely downloadable books — public domain works, government documents, and Creative Commons material — the process is different and unrestricted. See How to Download Internet Archive Books as PDF or EPUB for that walkthrough.
Arkibber helps you search across the Archive's collections to find what is actually available. By filtering results by media type and exploring item details before navigating to archive.org, you can quickly identify whether what you need is freely downloadable, borrowable, or restricted — so you know where you stand before investing time.