What bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I run into several headaches, and it's no longer feasible to buy books.
* Amazon shut off bookdepository.com
* Amazon.com just won't ship many books here.
* Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.
* Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here.
* Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.
Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books.
The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.
I also pirate things. Often. I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy.
Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home.
I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the book, I guess.
And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I pirated it, then decided to buy it.
It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just not to pay.
Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the book and credits the ebook my account.
Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.
I have legal, instant access to nearly every technical publication I need in digital form, but I still illegally download almost everything. It's much faster to get the docs, I don't have to slog through crippled page navigation or search, and they don't cut me off because I've opened too many research papers in one day to see if any of them actually answer my question.
The music and TV/film industries figured out how to get people to pay. The print industry can figure it out too.
I have 4 library bookshelves (7 foot tall ones). And they're packed with books. *Bought* books.
But dealing with more current "online books" are a fraud. They 'sell' these books, but in actuality they're rentals due to DRM. I cant read them on Linux; I cant sell them; I cant read them on my phone; I can't print past their arbitrary print limits.
I have none of the same rights of these physical books.
> I have none of the same rights of these physical books.
So much effort spent creating DRM systems that try to destroy the natural advantages of ebooks over paper books.
Ebooks and the internet could have ushered in a golden age of worldwide digital libraries unlimited by the location or quantity of physical paper books.
The current copyright and technical control regime may be good for some publishers and authors, but at what cost in terms of lost value to humanity as a whole?
I'd say, maybe buy the physical book and pirate the Ebooks. I haven't been the best at this... I just buy the ebooks and strip them... But I suppose I could buy a physical book locally and have a loaner for a friend, or give it to charity
Kill a tree just so that you can feel morally correct and the author gets a 2¢ royalty? Naw, just pirate and don't feel bad since apparently that is what publishers want you to do[0]. Maybe buy the author a coffee if you ever run into them.
[0] based on their actions it sure seems like this is the case.
Those forest they own came with trees that would be preserved if they didn't exist.
They do make deserts out of forests when they clearcut. A lot of land is owned by others (governments, native tribes) and permits are used to extract the pulp
Trees grown for paper pulp regrow quickly and are farmed. If you know of old-growth forests that have recently been clearcut for paper pulp, please cite a source.
The physical copy exists to be a conversation piece on a shelf, to loan out, talk to friends about, not mind losing to a family member who's visiting, etc.
The digital copy exists to mark up, index, search, highlight, learn from, etc. If it's not on LibGen I'll buy it on Kobo and strip it in to my library using Obok DeDRM and an old ePaper reader I wouldn't want to use otherwise, and then buy a physical copy of it's something I'd want to share.
So often the books I loan out are "clean" and don't even have a wrinkle in the spine but sometimes I'll go through and dog-ear important passages or pencil-line particular parts. I've had friends assume I hadn't actually read the book until we pull out koreader and go over my highlights.
Tabletop RPG publishers are making inroads towards making digital versions of books available with purchase of physical books from indie games shops. Whenever I'm looking for a new TTRPG book I always first ask my Friendly Local Game Shops if they're in the Bits & Mortar program and it influences where I purchase. Even if the shop isn't part of the program many of the publishers will now send a PDF if you send them a picture of the receipt (shout out to Free League Publishing for being awesome about this).
Put a unique QR code in each physical book in some standardized location (probably the publisher's imprint page). Then, someone can scan it to purchase it. The bookstore then gets a cut of the purchase. It would even work browsing a friend's bookshelf or a library.
Seems like it'd be a win for consumers, publishers, and bookstores all alike, and it doesn't seem too complicated to implement technically.
Per physical copy, indeed. That's what would allow attribution of the sale to the store.
Even a QR code that provided a link that would allow an easy purchase for the ISBN would be great for publisher and the customer. It would, however, not be appealing to bookstores, since it just means the customer comes in, browses, and purchases it online, cutting out the bookstore that was playing a critical role in the process and cannibalizing its own sales.
You could create a bookstore-and-ISBN tuple that would also allow attribution without uniquely identifying each physical book. Probably improves privacy marginally (though it would provide a permanent indicator of which bookstore it was purchased from), but with the downside that it complicates things behind the scenes; what if one bookstore acquires another bookstore's inventory? And a bookstore ordering a new book would have to have its own individual print run.
You could handle that with geofencing, too. If somebody didn't want to participate in this scheme, they could easily not, after all. (Heck, you could even just have a separate code on the wall, to be scanned when prompted.)
> Print copies, wherever they are bought, come with free electronic versions in PDF, ePub and Kindle formats. With your print copy in hand, register it on the Manning site and you can download the digital versions from your account.
No affiliation, I’m just a long-time satisfied customer.
The same can be said for the absolutely awful way that "smart" tvs work these days. A friend of mine has a "smart" tv and pays over $400 a month for cable tv and a huge variety of streaming services in order to watch all the things he wants to watch. Many times we have tried (and failed) to navigate the dizzying array of networks and services in an attempt to watch a game or a fight that should be legitimately able to watch due to his paid subscriptions, only to give up and end up pirating it because it was unavailable and/or too much of a hassle.
> No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough
Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the entire book, but only a small section of it at a time is “descrambled” in the live view.
On more than one occasion I’ve used this to look up some specific topic, which was immediately viewable (and unblocked me on that problem), then gone on to purchase the book because I know it’s high quality and I’m likely to refer to it in the future for other reasons.
I might be misunderstanding the scheme, but that sounds like someone would just need to automate viewing of consecutive sections in live view as it would unblur each section until you've downloaded the whole book. What am I missing?
You’re not missing anything, but apparently it works for them. I suppose if it were more widespread then there’d be more incentive to automate scraping entire books.
They also sell their eBooks as normal PDFs (no DRM).
I assume it’s a healthy combination of making high quality technical publications easy to acquire at a reasonable price. Similar to how digital movie and music piracy finally died down when that media became reasonably easy to acquire legally.
I wonder if someone in the USA could setup a "piracy forgiveness service" where they accept amazon orders of books and movies and just immediately shred them.
Who defines "thievery"? The RIAA? If I buy something, I expect full rights to it. Dead simple. I pay for the content, and then I pirate it because the distributer somehow invested millions of dollars (instead of distributing to authors, mind you) into making a less consumer friendly platform than piracy.
Not to mention, internet piracy is not thievery. The only thing in limited quantity is the silicon that enables it.
If piracy did not exist I would likely not buy these things in the first place, because the stupid restrictions mean I can't consume what I paid for. In that way, my hand is indeed forced.
Great! You can expect whatever you want. Just as the seller can set whatever terms and price they want.
> who is being cheated here?
Well, if the seller is clear as about the terms they are willing to sell for, and you just take it without paying, you are the one cheating.
You may have a moral right to cheat because you, I guess, have a right to have everyone offer the deal you expect. But I think it's taking it a bit far to say that not only are you going to take the content without paying, but you also want to feel cheated when doing so.
The publisher was willing to sell X for $Y. You took X + Z for $Y.
I get that you feel entitled to it, and I've certainly pirated stuff for convenience or financial reasons (as a starving college student, there was a lot of $500 - $5000 software that I really needed).
But it's disingenuous to play the victim when you're the one not honoring a seller's right to set the terms of sale. Pirate away, by all means, but spare us the nobility.
This quote is incredibly true for me. I used to (like 2 decades ago) pirate everything. Then Steam came along, and it is just so easy to buy things, and I don't have to worry about malware keygens or no-cd hacks. I haven't pirated a game since 2005.
I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.
pretty much. the only game I have pirated in the last 10 years are some had bought several decades ago for windows 95/98 and are ones that are not available on steam or GOG that I had the CD/floppy disk for but my laptop doesn't have a drive for either and would require a no-disc crack to run anyway. Essentially abandonware that no one seems to even know who own the IP for me to give my money to or if they do don't care to bother making it available for me to pay them.
It's so true. In the case where price actually is the issue, then it ceases to be a piracy problem, since they likely couldn't afford to pay anyway. No customer lost in many cases.
Yeah, it's stupid. Copyright industry pretty much defeats itself with their licensing nonsense that nobody cares about. Anything short of everything humanity has ever created in one place at negligible costs fails to compete with copyright infringement.
From the perspective of a consumer, the only real difference between a library and zlib is that "checkouts" aren't time-limited. So why aren't there any good, copyright-respecting digital libraries out there? The simple answer is that publishers either completely prohibit library usage of their ebooks, or have such onerous licensing terms that libraries can't afford to maintain large collections [1].
Adding to this, region restrictions on video content.
There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in the US?
In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another subscription?
There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"?
After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect people would do?
To be fair, that is probably partially fallout from the Canadian content regulations and possibly other law regarding corporate ownership. Not sure because it has been over two decades since I was current in that stuff.
They actually just passed a new law last week to legislate even more CanCon meddling on online streaming sites, including YouTube and social media feeds.
Canada subsidizes an entertainment industry that mainly produces things nobody wants to watch, so they're regulating companies to algorithmically force it on Canadians.
The amazing shows and movies that have come out of Canada in the last 20 years are popular because they're good... not because of some visibility issue with the rest of the fodder from companies that spend more on admin related to lucrative tax breaks and grants than they do actually producing content.
My impression back then was that the TV cancon rules were a disaster, and the music ones may have helped more than hurt, after the first 10 years or so.
Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never contributed additional books in their collection back to Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor.
But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?
> * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.
Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can do is change the Billing Information on your account so that your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info. But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that have used this method). It should go through and purchase the book.
The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.
The point is that you should not have to hack your way through this or that payment system, because sooner or later the hack will be blocked and you will lose access even to stuff you paid for. It's not even a hypothetical, the parent poster brings clear examples of this happening multiple times.
Z-Library has more books. Z-Library contains every book within Libgen plus books that have been uploaded by Z-Library's userbase and never made it to Libgen.
Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.
Just like any country with an official language other than English, I would expect them to have bookstores full of Hebrew books, with a small section of English books that you've probably already read.
The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst English and French speakers living here".
any half decent bookstore will just order the books for you and you'll get them a few days later. It's how I buy most of my English books in a non-English speaking country. Added benefit, weans yourself off the 'i have to have it now' shopping culture
That's how I used to get sheet music. It's a little pricier but I could trust the owner find an edition I would enjoy. They closed down a few years ago, and there's no nearby alternative.
This is the way. Did people forget you could do this, with the advent of online sales? It costs nothing more, it helps the store stay open, and it's one less sale for Amazon.
Indeed - and I purchase all of my Hebrew books and magazines there. If we're lucky the chains will bring in ~50 English books per quarter, and eventually sell them all off. These 50 books are usually ~5 Harry Potter, ~10 kid fantasy, and a random smattering of other things. They will not special order.
I can actually order a book on Amazon, to a drop shipper in the US, DHS it to Israel for less than the price of special ordering the book here, via צומת ספרים, assuming they even want to allow the special order.
Suffice it to say people don't try. There are two English book stores in the country (and a French one) that will go out of their way to work with you. They run into the geographic frustrations put in place by publishers. It's a mess.
You cannot compare the ability to purchase over a million books online to the selection at a bookstore. Plus my personal preference is reading books on my phone, not as an actual book.
Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.
Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from my library that it's switching to another system because Overdrive is going out of business.
I also live in Israel and have the same exact problems. I probably spend $5k a year on books but just cannot deal with the headache of trying to purchase a book and failing. VPNs, changing my iTunes Store location, just an absolutely frustrating experience for absolutely no good reason.
The how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows what other terms they can come up with.
I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.
Without wanting to kick off what I bet would be a really great political argument involving the Israel/Palestine problem, I just want to point out that story is fourteen years old. The situation regarding importing books to Gaza might be better or worse after fourteen years but I doubt if it's the same.
Corporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves are corrupt, what meaningful laws do manage to exist are not enforced correctly due to these revolving doors. So when corporations hurt the People in major ways on a daily basis, nothing from the government, in fact the government is systemically complicit.
But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared.
The US Trade Representative publishes a literal naughty list of countries whose efforts to combat infringement it deems insufficient. The document is filled with language such as "stakeholders report this", "shareholders are concerned about that". Corporations leveraging the might of the US government to sanction other countries that have better things to do than police imaginary american property.
Many people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.
The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley?
If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to help people, and you're going to have to work with that if you ever want to fix the system.
>The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley?
Your point has some merit, but there's a big difference between being an engineer working with systems that can be misused and waking up every morning ready to crack people's skulls (especially since those people are usually impoverished, gender & sexual minorities, marginalized in some other way, etc) or outright murder them.
Yes, both people contribute to systemic violence in a way, but I would argue that there is a vast gulf between participating in society (which is mandatory) and being at the tip of the spear of violent repression.
Imagine having coworkers who routinely committed murder and received paid vacations for it.
What's the solution, then? If central authority is Bad (TM), is it decentralized authority that is the solution? IE, everyone gets a gun, everyone is deputized, everyone is responsible for upholding the law as citizens and enforcers.
Offload most police duties to civilian organizations who are specifically trained to do them. Traffic enforcement doesn't need a gun. Mental health crisis intervention is made worse by cops. (A yelling homeless man doesn't need a cop, they need someone trained to help with this specific issue.)
Retain a small number of cops to deal with serious crimes (homicides, etc) and disarm them except in emergencies.
We also need to tackle criminal justice reform - ensure we have sufficient public defenders, ensure people have speedy access to trials, don't lock everyone in jail while awaiting trial, don't pressure people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit just so they can keep out of jail. Reprioritize minor offenses - who cares if someone has pot, why are we spending any time on it?
I don't even get how the hell copyright infringement became a matter of criminal law. If you're distributing a product that infringes on somebody's IP in a way which negatively impacts their profits, that is (by which i mean "should be") a matter of civil law and they can sue for damages. Why the hell should law enforcement get involved at all?
There’s a video of double dribble game glitch for the NES. Fox/family guy decided to rip it for their show and copyright struck the original video. So they don’t even do anything to corporations ripping of people’s works.
That's redundant and an invocation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The cronyism is an inherent feature of capitalism, not a bug. There are no real-world examples of non-crony capitalism.
The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and only gets worse.
The most honest capitalists (e.g. some AnCaps, some neoliberals) do make this point, but it's not very common. As much as I disagree with their views, I respect their blunt honesty about the system they endorse.
What I can't stand is the disingenuous whitewashing of capitalism, which boils down to "don't trust your lying eyes" and "it's not Real Capitalism, which is actually cool and good". One can't have a productive discussion with these sorts of evangelists, much like one can't have a productive discussion with fanatical cryptocurrency fanboys who insist that ugly monkey JPEGs and The Blonkchain will magically create a perfect society, if only we just Do It Harder.
"Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. It prevents us from discussing actually-existing capitalism.
> "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche.
There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc...
Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
>Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail.
I argue that it's a fundamental defect, an architectural one, and it won't be solved with infinite patches and workarounds.
You can patch a defective design until it's somewhat functional, but it will never compare to a properly architected design. In the case of economics, we need to consciously choose what we want to incentivize based on how we want society to look and function.
>Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps.
This is the MAGA argument: "things were better in the old days". This is an appeal to false nostalgia and does not hold up to scrutiny. It also ignores the fact that every successful small company eventually becomes a big company.
Even in the days of small/pastoral/cottage capitalism there existed the same problems we have now, just more isolated and harder to root out because they were very numerous and too widely distributed. Abuse was very common, and any complaints were dismissed as "just the way things are" or countered with "then start your own business" or "get rich enough so you don't have to participate" or "you're gay/black/foreign so you should be thankful for a job" or simply "you deserve it because <X>". These things eventually improved, but every improvement was paid for in blood.
One worker at some 'ma and pa' business cannot effectively unionize, and has little bargaining power. In very small communities where everyone knew each other that worker may have more leverage by way of putting community relationships on the line (if they had some social power), but it never seemed to stop individual business owners from eventually buying up entire towns and running roughshod over the population.
Recent history and contemporary life is full of examples of this sort of thing — towns where everyone works at the same lumber mill or factory owned by That One Guy Who Lives In A Huge Mansion On The Hill. Now it's a Wal-Mart or Amazon fulfillment center owned by One Corporation that's distributed and faceless.
Companies are effectively dictatorships. Workers have little say in how a company is run, except in cases where they rebel against the system and go outside of it to redress their grievances.
Even then, this redress has never changed the fundamental relationship between worker and capitalist: the worker will always be a subject, because there is no democracy in the workplace.
It really amazes me how people can simultaneously support democracy and capitalism (dictatorship).
>The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
Even 'small capitalism' promotes severely undesirable incentives at its core, which appear at all levels of scaling. Can you provide an example of where it doesn't, or show that socialism/communism/whatever is just as bad?
I think you've misinterpreted me. I'm not a capitalists apologists, I just acknowledge the difference between theory and implementation.
Capitalism as a theory does promote undesirable incentives, that's why I wrote "it promotes the 'bad' parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc..." I think you also missed where I wrote "You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business." I thought I was implying it with 'ma and pa shops' but perhaps I should have used more exact numbers: capping the number of employees to 10 and then limiting the radius of business to 5 miles would make businesses so numerous, small, and presumably with a low enough startup cost that "disgruntled employees" could realistically strike it out on their own. Also, I only suggested the capping/geographical limiting as an idea/example. It's easy to imagine other ideas for discouraging the "bad" parts of capitalism, like forcing a wage ratio, e.g. the CEO cannot make more than 10 times what their average worker makes.
I never watch news so I cannot comment on anything topical. My thoughts are my own. If something I wrote has some sort of political connotations to current goings-on, then that's coincidence.
Personally, I dream of a Star Trek-ien utopia that promotes a pro-work culture with no money, no copyrights, no intellectual property, offers equal opportunity, and utilizes technology - like AI - to free folks to pursue a more meaningful existence. People should democratically vote on the services they want - food and shelter being the most obvious - and if there aren't enough volunteers for these services, then you conscript them. My thinking is if the military can conscript people to fight wars, then certainly you can conscript people to perform economic work; especially since it would be work that the majority democratically voted for! Everything we have today is because people built it; under the implementation I'm proposing we can still have everything - people just have to be willing to work for it in the absence of the "bad" parts of human nature. I'm not naïve enough to believe the implementation I'm describing would be immune to problems. At the end of the day, people have to "believe" in the system and want to make it work.
The first sale doctrine that libraries rely on doesn't exist for digital media, so how would you propose build a "morally acceptable" digital library?
* You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others.
* You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason.
* You can't do it by buying a distribution license because some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those.
* You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending. Internet archive tried that.
The current situation today requires either paying perpetual, recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as is already the case at most local libraries.
paywalling art & culture is wrong, imagine paying a license fee on the use of the italian pizza culture, on the catholic bible, on songs and works of arts like images of paintings bcs people could/should go to the museum and pay to see the paintins. Obviously commercial uses of third parties intellectual propriety should be regulated and enforced.
Just dropping my 2ç here. A lot of the debate i read on this article verges on the subject of piracy as in copyrights infringement. Let's not forget that these sites also carry an enormous amount of old, uncopyrighted, obscure, impossible to find texts that would otherwise be lost forever and that is a service that they pay for and ultimately benefits all of humanity.
Seems to me that the storage TB/$ is rising at least slightly faster than the total size of these kinds of archives. I wonder how long it will be until we can feasibly keep personal copies of zlib (and libgen, and scihub).
I had heard that Anna's archive is several years out of date compared to zlibrary, do you know if thats still true? I didn't see any explanation in a quick perusal of the links you shared.
I'm not sure how large z-lib is, but LibGen is ~120TB. You can pick up a 5TB external HDD on Amazon for ~$100, so it would cost a good $2400 dollars for the raw storage costs if you wanted to host it all yourself. You really have to wonder how the owners fund all of this.
The server cost is going to be the problem here, since you'll need SAS drives and a JBOD to house these hard drives, especially if you want to run a raidx for redundancy.
And the crazy thing is it's not even designed specifically for storage, it just kind of has that space. Good for big GPUs. I have a define 7 for my gaming pc with 0 HDDs installed (M.2 only)! It's a great case anyhow.
I very nearly bought a second one to replace an actual designed-for-NAS case which only has room for 8 HDD; the only reason I didn't is because that older Fractal Design case still works fine. It lives in the living room in the open without shame, and the Design 7 would look even better.
I run a 36 bay supermicro server I got for $900 on ebay which could easily host all this. I buy used 6tb sas drives off ebay for $26 a piece. They'd be even cheaper in bulk. That's $4.33 a tb, or about $520 total. You'll want to add a handful of drives for redundancy (we are talking used drives here) but either way it's entirely possible to host this entire thing including hardware for under 1500. Well within reason for someone passionate about it.
I've been speccing a home storage server in the 50-100tb range and was considering this, but annual electricity costs made it infeasible. How much power does a machine like this consume?
My calculation off a Dell 2U was something like 195W idle - ~900 kWH / year. I'm in California so paying 50 cents per kWH, that would be ~$450 per year -- decided to scale back to a low power tower with huge disks. More upfront, but less annually. More disk drives (6tb vs 18tb) increased that to the point where I figured it was better to have fewer larger disks, even if they are pricier, because of the cost to run them.
I haven't checked exactly how much juice the server is pulling now. It was somewhere in 120-150w range with low utilization when I first got it, but I have considerably more disks and VMs now so probably around 200 to 250ish.
I did some rough estimates to see if the big disks were more cost effective than the 6tb ones and came to the conclusion small disks were worth it for me. The long term cost was pretty close though in the midwest where electricity is like 15 cents per kWh, giant disks would definitely be the better choice in CA.
A 20TB NAS HDD is $350, new. A 5-6 bay new enclosure is $100. $2400 for brand new storage + a little Raspberry Pi to serve it (another $100) is less than the price of a single new MacBook Pro.
It's easily within the means of relatively affluent professionals anywhere.
I don't think you seriously believe the NSA is trying to trawl for copyright violations. Arguments require more than just conflating some random facts and going 'there, see'.
They definitely are. Snowden literally proved this. They are collecting data at a MASSIVE SCALE. They are doing this as one of the commenters noted above; To find TS leaks and to find the next 9/11.
But they are logging that information in some database somewhere. So it's not a question if they care/ will enforce it now, but rather will they care or enforce it for the rest of eternity.
What people don't seem to understand about privacy is that once you give it away, it is gone forever. In some dystopian future where every American is assigned a social score, you pirating things in the early '00's may harm your ability to get a house loan.
The widespread adoption of TLS means that a far greater effort has been put into exploits needed to gain access to the unencrypted side of a communication channel. It's not as big an if as it was before Snowden.
Correlation attacks only work when you can see both ends of the traffic. When you visit an .onion address, there is no other “end”—all traffic stays within the Tor network and goes directly to the hidden service server, which is ‘just’ another relay within the network.
I would assume that the NSA runs enough TOR nodes to correlate traffic from one side of the network to the other side at least a decent percentage of the time. I would also assume that they have a realtime view of the number of bytes entering or leaving any datacenter.
Sad. I pirate 100% of my books. After i read them i purchase the physical copy. I buy more books when i can try them first! Its also enjoyable to have it open on your computer for when you have a moment.
"phishing" of this type is unfortunately a common problem on Tor because the design of hidden services makes it very difficult for a user to validate where they're connecting. It's totally possible that this situation is not malicious but it sure is sketchy and is similar to a lot of malicious fronting that you can find on Tor for popular services. I consider this a major defect of the hidden service design but there's only so much motivation to address it.
Something that made me a bit sad about LLMs like ChatGPT, is that they're primarily trained on free/open data sets such as Reddit, Wikipedia, and ArXiV.
Instead, we could be training LLMs on published scientific papers, textbooks, and high-quality reference materials, but we can't, because not only are they behind paywalls, they're behind thousands of individual paywalls.
OpenAI spent millions of dollars on building the data fed into the models.
No one has any idea what it's trained on. Also, with the advent of AutoGPT/llamaIndex, you can train it yourself on a massive stockpile of pirated data if you wanted.
I wonder if future generations will see this akin to the dark ages where the churches tried to control what people could access for information and burned books or punished those who published information they did not like.
If free lending libraries and search engines didn't exist as traditions already, the copyright cops would never let them be invented from scratch today.
I genuinely don't know what I'll do if/when library Genesis goes down. The only thing worse would be losing Wikipedia.
Has anyone attempted to put together something like torrents of the top 100Gb/1TB/10Tb etc of LibGen data? My dream would be to mirror the whole thing, but that's well beyond my budget/administrative abilities.
IANAL but Z-Lib is run as a for-profit business which makes it more of an open and shut case, especially if they're hosting their own files (which I believe they were, to implement that pay gate).
LibGen acts more like an archive that's hosted on IPFS which eliminates a lot of the liability and can't realistically be taken down. You can only download the books from the mirrors LibGen links to and they're often just IP addresses so there's no DNS zone to seize.
I believe a significant difference between the two is that Z-Library actively asks for donations in return for more features, whereas Library Genesis does no such thing AFAICT.
They are definitely not better known among normal people -- Z-Library was trending on TikTok massively (this is what prompted the aggressive arrests and seizures lol)
It is possible that Libgen's proprietors are known to law enforcement but never stepped within reach of Western legal authorities. Certainly, had Z-Library's staff all stayed within Russia, they never would have been arrested.
To add insult to the injury, SS-Library would be another fitting name to avoid domain seizures. May be unrelated though, but they should think about rebranding as some letter combinations unfortunately became poisonous and probably became contributing factors for warrants.
Oh no! Won't someone think of 'The Economy' or 'The Children'?!
Sorry man, an unrestricted global 'public library' that allows those who can't afford it to access just about any published book is an unmitigated 'good thing'. I bet you also hate scihub as well. Won't someone think of the poor academic journals and their rent seeking?
If the original writer or peer reviewers who DO THE JOB of the paper itself were paid from the collections, the argument would be "well with your purchases, the author and reviewers earn enough to fund more research or pay bills but no. Its only the publishers who get paid.
These peer reviewers are the only reason journals even matter. Their selectivity is the whole point. They should all quit those publishers and start a literal blog.
and I hope that corporation's ability to lobby Congress to change laws against the public interest banned, and their lawyer's ability to practice law removed for ever.
4chan thrives off troll comments like this. I sometimes think it's healthy for online debate because you're much less likely to viciously attack someone if you can't be sure if they're trolling or not. Also, the opposing side gets steelmanned which is less likely when every member of a group belongs to the same side or if the moderation leans heavily of one side (neither of which apply to HN).
* Amazon shut off bookdepository.com
* Amazon.com just won't ship many books here.
* Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.
* Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here.
* Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.
Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books.
The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.