I despise ho the internet archive no longer allows downloads. Reading a book on that site is tortorous.

There’s no evidence that the publishers have lost a dime,” Gratz said during oral arguments at a New York district court.

It’s up to a federal judge, John Koeltl, to decide if IA’s digital lending constitutes copyright infringement. During oral arguments, Koeltl’s tough questioning of both Gratz and the plaintiff’s attorney, Elizabeth McNamara, suggested that resolving this matter is a less straightforward task than either side has so far indicated. Koeltl pointed out that because publishers have a right to control the reproduction of their books, the “heart of the case,” was figuring out whether IA’s book scanning violates copyrights by reproducing an already licensed physical book and lending it without paying more licensing fees to publishers.

“Does the library have the right to make a copy of the book that it otherwise owns and then lend that e-book—which it has made without a license and without permission—to patrons of the library?” Koeltl asked Gratz as a tense pushback to IA’s stance that this particular case is just about a library’s right to loan out books.

McNamara argued that many libraries pay licensing fees to publishers to lend e-books, and she said this was the market harmed by IA’s digital lending practices. The burden is on IA to prove that’s not the case, or else it risks being found liable and potentially getting hit with a permanent injunction to stop the alleged infringing behavior. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-internet-archive-hurt-sales/

Edit :

McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access. She also told Koeltl that publishers suing—Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley—are concerned that there are already some libraries avoiding paying e-book licensing fees by partnering with IA and making their own copies. If the court sanctioned IA’s digitization practices and thousands of libraries started digitizing the books in their collections, the entire e-book licensing market would collapse, McNamara suggested.

These are the publishers that recently got boycotted, and had employees go on strike due to save wages.

I only use it for the free fringe stuff, I would never read a book from the website UI except just to search for a reference. They don't have an app do they?

It's relatively straightforward to rip loaned books from the IA too - if you can't remove the drm you can just download each individual page scan and recompile.

If the court sanctioned IA’s digitization practices and thousands of libraries started digitizing the books in their collections, the entire e-book licensing market would collapse

Sounds great, some of those libraries might scan some of the stuff that Google and IA wont. There's still plenty of books out of copyright with no digital scan, mostly stuff that doesn't give the current politically correct spin on history or science. But then maybe publishers would stop producing ebooks? Or develop some new technology 10 times harder than DRM to crack.

If you own a physical book, you can scan it, just with a phone and an app, very well and efficiently these days - and distribute it how you like. That would be a difficult thing to eliminate.

EDIT there does appear to be an app for reading IA books:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.openlibrary.testing.twa