This would provide digital books with unlimited lending for a while while the US is in lock down. As the lock down progressed, wait lists for books at archive.org got longer and longer. So the NEL discarded the wait list for a while for the books listed in the NEL.
Here is the National Emergency Library link: https://archive.org/details/nationalemergencylibrary
Books come in a variety of formats at the Internet Archive (archive.org). Some are uploaded as PDF, then converted automatically to text or EPUB. However these automatic conversions leave a lot to be desired since almost none of them are proofread by a human. But you can read the PDF, or read the book online, or try to read an HTML or EPUB version of the book. There are 1.4 million books in the NEL right now. Many other free books are on archive.org too.
The announcement: https://blog.archive.org/category/announcements/
