Where to find the Happy Mutant Handbook [Update]

On October 14, 2010, "friends of the San Francisco Public Library" uploaded The Happy Mutant Handbook to the Internet Archive for all the world to borrow. See, the Internet Archive's text library is mostly titles that are beyond copyrights, but that's not to say all are. For those newer titles that are added, there's a collection of books available for "controlled digital lending." So those titles work like physical books in a library—only one person can check out the title at a time. Many digital library collections work like that to, which is why you have to wait to see what is basically a fancy webpage. 

It's nice to say that information wants to be free, but the creation, collection, and distribution of information costs something to someone, in terms of time to create the thing, or the cost of buying and maintaining servers for digital goods, and the electricity to keep it all powered.

But sometimes people decide it's a good time to bend the rules, like on March 24, 2020, when the Internet Archive announced a National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books to Students and the Public. They removed the borrowing limit on 1.4 million books through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.

Feedback was mixed, between those (including librarians) who were thankful for this increased access, at a time when millions of physical books were now inaccessible to the public. Others saw this as piracy. (Here's a conversation of this sort, with links to author and agency comments, which also fall on both sides of for and against the NEL).

Really, this is a lengthy way of saying that if you sign up for a free Internet Archive account, you can read all of the Happy Mutant Handbook, without restriction, from the comfort of wherever you are, with a digital device in front of you.

And wherever you are, may you be safe.