libgen and z-library must be Russia's greatest philanthropic contribution to the rest of mankind (despite all the other dodgy stuff it is involved in, which I am not belittling).
It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view: knock out a hugely profitable business (textbook publishing) of you adversary while increasing your soft power by 100x due to the unpopularity of said industry.
There are surely loads of artists and independent technical authors who got screwed by it which I am not diminishing, but this is more than dwarfed by the benefit to the hundred of millions around the world especially from developing countries who can't afford to pay $100+ for a textbook on essential topic like organic chemistry or electrical engineering. In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to submit the book to the open domain.
While the founders may have their origins in the Soviet Union (and not Russian), I don’t think the site has anything todo with the Russian government. Rather, it’s the reaction of some individuals to the difficult and expensive access to literature in the west.
As a Russian, I agree in the part that it seems extremely unlikely our government would even think about doing something like this. (Wikipedia says it started explicitly in 1990’s RuNet though, which I am inclined to believe.)
A further issue that’s often overlooked in English-language discussion is Russian-language books.
A lot of specialist scientific literature such as monographs only saw a single run of 300, 1000, or at best 3000 copies in the Soviet Union, and that’s it. If you’d missed it and didn’t have access to one of a handful of libraries that had it, tough luck. (To give an idea of what counts as specialist, the foremost textbook on general relativity, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, was translated into Russian in 1977 and had a single 3000-copy print run. The 1973 English original is still in print.)
Furthermore, when the Soviet Union fell, so for the most part did the publishing houses, and nobody knows where the offset printing films for the books went. So nobody can print Soviet books again without typesetting them from scratch, even those that weren’t rare. (Did you know that the new Russian edition of Gradshtein and Ryzhik’s special functions manual is technically a translation from Russian to English to Russian? Or so it says on the copyright page, anyway.)
In that environment, having widely available scans of books was absolutely vital; for those who teach students fresh out of high school who don’t necessarily know enough English, it still is. Today’s LibGen arose as an amalgamation of a number of those efforts from the early days of the Russian-speaking Internet.
One was maintained (unofficially) by people from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Another was mirrored (unofficially) by a Moscow-based particle physics institute that until several years ago originated a large part of the Russian presence at CERN. I’m sure other Russian-speaking research centers contributed just as much or more, I’m just not familliar with that part of the history.
As Russian-language scientific publishing stagnated, and subscriptions to English-language literature by and large did not materialize (what with them costing most of a typical money-starved institute’s budget), obtaining scanned and ebook versions of English-language literature from Western acquaintances became more important. People gradually unified under LibGen’s banner, and here we are.
And yes, none of this ever got government support, as far as I know.
Yes this has been a misdirection from the publishers for a while that even some librarians are repeating (other things are supposedly stolen credentials used to do more than just getting access to publications).
I think you’re overstating how much anyone knows or cares that Libgen is Russian (if that is a correct categorization). Also, as you imply, the hurt to publishers may be overstated - a download is not a lost sale.
> It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.
An ancedote is not the same as data.
(Legal) libraries had an effect of increasing sales, much to the surprise of everyone when they were first introduced. Its entirely possible that piracy could have too. Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows. I think the effects are non-obvious enough that actual studies are needed to know what the actual affect is.
I, on the other hand, have never purchased anything I was going to pirate if I couldn't find it. So for me it definitely is not correlated. If I couldn't find it I just moved on. I tend to pirate nice to haves.
Everybody's different. For me, an inverse correlation happens: libgen etc. act as a bookshop where I can freely browse and evaluate stuff before I buy. So I want to make sure I'm not cheated.
Sometimes the brand is enough, i.e. I know by experience that if a book is from Manning I can trust it, whereas if it's from Packt it's hit-or-miss-but-probably-miss. Self-published ones? 90% are worthless, 1% are gems with the rest on the verge. You can't really know this from reading a sample chapter or the ToC.
people overestimate the capabilities of the corrupt russian government to an absurd degree. Piracy is rampant in russia because it s not suppressed there. VK is full of all the movies you can think of.
My thoughts exactly; I recall stumbling across libgen back in 2018 - it even had a user forum; back then it was clearly just a one-person operation. I got the impression it was someone who liked collecting, organising and sharing PDFs that interested them. And then with time it, the site blew up in popularity.
PDFs also have a scripting language built in, right? Could that be a good attack vector?
It seems like a pretty good site to attack people from, for social reasons. It sits at a nice confluence of: technically unauthorized copying, but feels like not such a big deal. And getting academic papers can be a PITA. And the audience is probably self-selecting for folks who are doing interesting STEM stuff.
I guess I’m thinking of somebody like myself, like I’ve known forever the prudent thing to do is disable JavaScript on my browser wherever possible. But I didn’t know PDFs had a built in scripting language until a couple years ago, I mostly use PDF for papers, where this isn’t as relevant.
In principle, any piece of software can have zero-days in it. PDF readers included.
Scripting languages can help with certain exploits, but arent vulnerabilities in and of themselves.
Anyhow, theoretically possible but also kind of unlikely. Such attacks usually have a shortish shelf life so are used in more targeted fashion to prolong the exploits life and get the most value from it.
More like post-Soviet. Regardless of the country of operation (which included e.g. Ecuador at some point, in which the owner of lib.rus.ec, the predecessor of libgen, moved), all these shadow libraries and knowledge preservation attempts represent consistent political action by the individuals with views formed by samizdat and the Soviet/post-crash reading culture. That includes Sci-Hub, Libgen, and those most never heard about but which were extremely influential, like the SU.BOOKS BBS or lib.ru.
There is a lot of evidence that it was originally made by someone Russian-speaking, starting from the fact that initial LibGen collection was some Russian and English literature taken from a Russian torrent-tracker. However I'm sure there was "no strategic point of view" whatsoever, just a pet project by some kind-hearted people.
American's still very much buy into the super-villain complex regarding Russia drilled into them over the decades.
Yes, Putin does all kind of shit, but this ... please, the national security interest card from copyright holders has been an evergreen.
I love that this perspective completely misses the point in the light of GenAI, the greatest appropriation of all human creation by large american tech companies, destroying untold commercialisation.
> Hoping for a better outcome, textbook publishers Cengage, Bedford, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education
The same companies pushing subscription models, restrictive e-book licensing, bundling, single-use codes, needless revisions, and anything else they can do to eliminate the first sale doctrine (and with it third party used textbook sales and rentals) and extract more money from students.
On the modern internet, you don't need to know who runs it in order to shut it down. They already have a court order to pull down all of the known domains and the registrars have 20 days to comply.
If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)
Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
They're not on TOR because normal people aren't on TOR. We've had various ways to distribute files with almost no way of getting caught for decades, but they're all a pain in the ass to use, requiring at the very least a native client program to access, so most people won't ever use them.
Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.
That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.
We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc.
I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.
Anna doesn't have any advertising. Their income is purely driven off donations, most of which are part of subscription packages that offer faster downloads.
The sites are ON Tor. They were not exclusively on Tor for reasons others have stated: most people don't have Tor or know how to use it, though I suspect that situation may evolve.
"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.
The Web hasn't required anything beyond what's installed for nearly the entirety of my life, and when it wasn't already there, someone would toss a CD at me in the parking lot and I'd be golden
Is this [0] not exclusively for the Tor browser? It states immediately below (on this [1] page) to "Make sure you're using Tor", and will only open in the Tor browser. I've actually used LibGen with Tor before, and treat it like the library not making ones borrowing history public knowledge
We're are talking about PDFs. A few mb usually. The speed hit of tor is probably fine. Also its a text book. Most users probably find some download latency acceptable.
I imagine the real reason is normies dont have tor installed.
Not a fan of the term “normies” but as a Tor “normie” isn’t Tor traffic identifiable and wouldn’t using it make it easier for authorities to focus on you?
For now. Right now DNS blocking is used because it works for 95% of people. Once it doesn't, they'll start demanding more serious means of blocking.
I'm surprised that didn't happen yet because DNS blocking is so ineffective. It's basically just akin to removing a business from the phone book or yellow pages.
Their datadump strategy is questionable. You end up needing perhaps 1 book for each shard. I guess they are made by sorting the ISBN or some other numerical field and then grouped until they reach a certain size. It is a bit annoying to put the shard of interest to download in your torrent client, pause it, figure out which book is the one you are after by looking at the ids, instruct your torrent client to only download that book.
My understanding was that's meant to be a way "ordinary people" () can contribute to the project by seeding one or more torrents with a part of their archive contents, to try and achieve a sort of "distributed backup", and it's not meant as a way for final users to get that one book they need.
() that is, people that can't run a IPFS node or other advanced options due to their limited space/network/skills/money.
Technologically? Maybe. Practically? I'm posting this while using uncensored Internet from within China, and not because I'm going out of my way to evade any blocking.
The GFW is more like the government put out an umbrella, but nothing is really forcing anyone to stand under it. Five steps and you're out. No doubt they could change that tomorrow if they so wished, but there are hurdles other than technical ones.
In my case I'm simply roaming using my German SIM-card, but plenty of VPNs would work too. They can detect and block these and do with certain ones, but for many they just... don't.
Isn't it the case that foreigners can just apply to be exempted from the GFW? I remember people mentioning that to me online in the 2010s who were semi-long term living in China.
I don't think that's necessary as app stores are already regional and easy to put additional restrictions on, and desktop internet usage is slowly being overtaken by app usage. And who knows, maybe even Windows 15 will only allow software downloaded through Safe and Verified(tm) app stores.
We already see mass censorship of legal speech via centralization and deplatforming, particularly via Cloudflare (which continues to happily host CSAM, animal SAM, and various other genuinely illegal websites). It is the unfortunate reality that the Internet will become various internets.
Even if they get the whole site taken down, I'm pretty sure whoever operates it can just deploy the same thing to any number of other domains. The actual server infrastructure would need to be taken offline, which it sounds like they don't have enough information to do.
Do you really believe that? Stuff like that is really troublesome to keep alive. Piratebay is hardly the thing is was, and it's a torrent site, which is relatively easy to host. A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore. They only exist because of almost fanatical dedication of some highly productive individuals, god bless them. Even if they don't get into serious trouble, it's still a hassle to avoid getting into trouble and work with actual content, not just host a bunch of torrent-links other people provide. So, at some point they'll lose the desire to do that, and I am not so sure that there always will be somebody to take post.
In fact, I even worry a bit about what will happen to Linux when Torvalds finally passes away, and for sure Linux depends on him much less so than all those pirate resources on the people who maintain them.
What happens when the key leadership retires/dies? No one has ever found a solution to this problem. It is not novel nor simple, and certainly not exclusive to any group, project, or institution.
Gradually scale back your [great] leadership and find people to do well defined small parts of it. The dynamic flexible structure becomes rigid and decays much more slowly.
Eventually even the top tasks can be strictly defined and frozen in time.
I mean it's not literally about the piratebay or libgen, or napster or whatever. I think historically it's true to say that it never really mattered how much effort they invest in destroying piracy. The fact that storage gets cheaper, yet text won't grow in size over time also makes me rather optimistic. Piracy was also always a decentralized effort by like-minded individuals, it's about the idea, you can arrest people, seize a name and people die, but an idea will never die.
Piracy of books in particular has been around since the 17th century btw, if that helps to convey why I'm not worried.
With old torrents, nothing compared to its heyday. I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now. 5-10 years ago it used to me newzbins and demonoid
I'm sure it's less popular, but I heard you can google pirate bay proxies and get on there in 2 minutes. Not that I would ever do such an immoral and illegal thing, depriving publishers of their hard-earned dollars! But from what I've heard you can still get any recent media and a lot of older stuff.
Even when you're in a major international market like the United States it's frequently the case that books are nearly unobtainable, especially if they're older or limited printings of specialist material. Sometimes I'll get recommended an old SF book or a particular reference manual and it turns out that it had one run in 1985 and there are four copies available on the used market at prices between three hundred and three thousand dollars. Tons of works are one minor complication, like living in the southern hemisphere or not being rich, away from being effectively non-existent.
Right?! I have a PocketBook, their store is absolutely useless, I can’t read anything with DRM, even had to return paid for books because I couldn’t get that adobe crap working on Linux. It’s drm-free or libgen for me.
I was considering getting one but your comment worries me. Do you have an older device? I thought the device itself could do the DRM if you threw an acsm file at it?
You can borrow e-books from libraries, but they come with DRM which means that they can manage “loans” and “returns” so they have a nominal number of books to lend out.
Quite a good service actually, called Libby. There are obviously ways to remove the DRM and make just a normal ePub but I’d quite like not to have to do that if I don’t have to.
It would seem they would be an even bigger target given they accept funds for "fast" downloads.
EDIT: btw, I tried to use anna's archive a few times and couldn't download the files. Something always broke before it finished. Definitely a way less good experience compared to libgen.
Anna's Archive is being sued, the court case has been going on for months [1].
Unlike this Libgen court case, they likely identified the owner, Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo. It's not just another court case against anonymous unidentified persons. They found her due to her poor opsec (nickname was anarchivist), so it may shut down soon.
This is a civil suit, so only a >50% likelihood of guilt is required. The circumstantial evidence is pretty convincing IMO unfortunately.
1. The name, Anna's - Anasztasia.
2. That Anasztasia has the nickname Anarchivist and is a self-described archivist.
3. That Anasztasia had a GitHub WorldCat scraping project.
Perhaps there were more things I forgot. Her personal blog writing reads very similar to the AA blog to me too. I unfortunately think they've found the AA owner.
Thankfully Anna's Archive is fully open-source, so it'll likely live past this civil case in some way.
> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.
How are they even able to stay anonymous if they're using google ads? I assume they have to provide a bank account to get paid, and with all the KYC laws it's not exactly trivial to hide your identity.
Sure, but how do you even keep it sustainable? All most useful things in the world are kinda fundamentally non-monetizable, illegal, or both. Wikipedia is the only thing that succeeded, and even that I'm starting to have some doubts about, because of how heavily politically influenced it is.
The biggest vulnerability for hackers has always been trying to get normie clout for our actions. Whether back in the day from pure social bragging, or now from trying to tie in to contemporary surveillance media. It's painful to watch, but if they had been more reserved you likely wouldn't hearing about them in the first place.
Really depends. Worst thing you can do as a hacker is have a brand. Anything more than "that guy who did X" is putting you as a flight risk for corporate.
You can't put a face or even handle on yourself, ideally. But that's all social media is these days.
While I see googletagmanager embedded on the .li site I don't think they can tell if you click the download link or just viewed the page for a book, at least.
The people running Tor for intel don’t give a damn about you downloading “C Structures for the Down and Out” or “Horus Lupercal, Saint or Savior—Another Take”, they have bigger fish to fry and don’t need that distraction
I mean, the latter seems to be a bit heretical. In fact, inquisitors have been dispatched to get rid of that. The Emperor Protects!
---
But that is a good point. It's doubtful that the intelligence community would care too much about people downloading books in the TOR Network. Or if they did get an interest in that, it works have to be a very special book, indeed.
TOR doesn't man in the middle your traffic. An exit node could snoop your traffic if it's unencrypted, but no TOR nodes can see into a encrypted TLS stream, for example.
So the distinction is, using bittorrent is not illegal (yet). It's just a protocol for sharing files. But using it as a tool for illegal activity is illegal, because youre doing something illegal.
> “Plaintiffs have been irreparably harmed as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct and will continue to be irreparably harmed should Defendants be allowed to continue operating the Libgen Sites”, the order reads.
There is no evidence. Because the defendants have remained anonymous, the court issues what’s called a “default judgment.” Essentially this means that since the defendants’ did not present their case, the court is obliged to accept the plaintiffs’ case as-is.
> n the order, McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer domains to publishers' control or "otherwise implement technical measures, such as holding, suspending, or canceling the domain name to ensure the domain names cannot be used" for further copyright infringement.
I am connecting from India and I already can't access the original libgen sites (libgen.rs, libgen.st). Indian ISPs waste no time in blocking websites at the first indication, even when the people requesting have no jurisdiction on them.
Two decades ago, a full-tuition scholarship allowed me to attend a wealthy private US university. After my first semester of expensive book purchases, I was on broke and on academic probation (partially from working so much to afford living expenses!).
Fortunately, a friend showed me how to purchase identical-edition textbooks from Indian/SriLankan publishers — written in English and with valid online access codes. Including shipping, textbooks from this source were identical material (on cheaper paper) but only cost 20% of US publisher prices.
On recollection, I'm sure this was somehow illegal/contraband; but looking at it it decades later it still feels like academia/publishers are robbing the majority of students with their prices (just like healthcare... taxes... etc.).
Is there any way for us individuals to help libgen? Some sort of ipfs distributed storage? It would be a tragedy if it was lost. It's an essential resource for scientists and for bibliophiles!
I've recently stopped buying books from publishers that engage in this shitfuckery (Elsevier, Springer, etc). This frees almost 1000 EUR/year that I'd love to steer towards libgen, sci-hub and similar initiatives. But not for paying these stupid fines, of course.
Libgen was ultimately a workaround to an endemic industry issue. Ideally all of the US folk here get a bill running to get better consumer rights for the media we consume, so we wouldn't have to run into such invasive DRM that can render your purchase unusable.
Not much to do about the cost though. Textbooks specifically can charge this much because the target is education, not the layman.
Thanks, was looking for something like this. With all the hardware I'm sure is sitting idle under HN users, we could make a big contribution for ~free.
Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think
An obvious candidate in this case would be the pro-rata share of the cost of creation. Possibly offset by ability to pay, e.g. if you can afford to pay a little more then do so because some people can't afford to pay as much and you still want the overall total to cover the cost.
It's an eternal struggle. The "perfect capitalist" wants infinite money with zero cost labor. The "perfect consumer" wants high quality products for free delivered instantly.
Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.
"Price" is not being used in a completely literal sense here. The core of the comment is how to calculate "value they received", and neither person involved would say it's $0.
I fully understand what they are saying. I'm saying it doesn't matter. There is a group of people that believe anything above free is too much. For both software and books.
If you're talking about people that think nothing should be paid, then kundi is not one of those people, and you're responding in the wrong place.
If you're talking about people that think payment should be optional but encouraged, then your "There is no pricing that would satisfy the person" "it doesn't matter" argument is incorrect. It does matter to those people and you can have a productive discussion about the correct amount.
Encouraging people to donate does nothing. People are encouraged to donate to open source and you see how many open source projects the internet depends on that are wildly underfunded. Maybe you believe people are more charitable than I do.
There is a group of people that believe getting less money than the maximum they can is too little. Let's not base business models on extremes. For example, Humble Bundle has shown there are other ways.
You haven't used Humble Bundle lately have you? They increased their minimums on the bundle and increased their required cut. Now, did they do this because they are hurting for money or for greed? I don't know.
...And they aren't unreasonable when these things have been rendered non-rivalrous goods.
Tell me, what price should your parents have charged you for teaching you to tie your shoes? To cook? To clean? Get back to me when the cost of digital reproduction requires factories, and trucking fleets, and paper mills. Oh wait... It doesn't. It requires transliteration to the written word, document layout, and maybe a little marketing so the world knows it's there.
If the paper book can be delivered for $8.99, there is no excuse for the ebook to be $8.99 per reader en perpetuity. Even Thomas Jefferson bloody understood that concept 200 years ago. One who lights their own candle off of another's leaves the one who was lit off of none the worse. So to with knowledge. The owners of industrial printing presses are just terrified of the possibility of the dawn of their own irrelevance. So they dump what money they get in creating artificial information asymmetries to exploit tor profit. And therein lay the root of all evil.
Most books that are in the public domain today (hence with no legal hindrances whatsoever) are still not meaningfully free or available to all. Copyright turns out to be simply a minor issue when viewed in a larger perspective; actually making works meaningfully available whenever this can be done free of legal issues is actually a lot more important. Note that this encompasses discovery and findability (e.g. through detailed cataloging) as well as practical access (e.g. through availability in a variety of open formats). It's a hard problem and one that's far from being comprehensively addressed.
Do the same people who think that every line of code ever written should be free; also think that every book, article, or painting should also be free?
Or are there people who draw lines and say that one type of work product should always be free while it is OK to charge for another?
Maybe get back to the original 20 years of copyright protection instead of the insane “70 years after death of the author” that has been made solely for the interest of the IP holders?
All my code (that isn't owned by a business, contractually) is free (well, technically I have a couple of private repos, but they're not paid access, they're just not available). So are all of the translation and commission work I did: people were paying to choose what I'd do next, not to keep something exclusive for themselves.
Corporatism is going to be the death of art, because we've normalized the idea that art is an ancillary function of some business project that first and foremost wants to generate profit.
they might suggest various other revenue models aside from royalties.
For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact
My code could effectively be free. The thing is most consumers don't care for code, they care for products. So I don't think open sourcing a currently closed source project would impact 99% of tech out there.
So if authors refuse to spend the time and resources needed to get a work ready for publication because they will be denied any compensation for doing so; should they be forced to write them anyway so that you can have your free books?
I think the creator of a book should be able to charge for their work if they desire to do so for a reasonable amount of time, actually, especially considering most authors don't make a lot of money form their works.
I don't even mind paying up front anymore. I'm in a position where I can afford it now, though for most of my adult life I've relied on sites like this to make ends meet.
However the only thing I want from publishers is DRM-free e-books (same for music). If you offer a way for me to actually own the digital property I'm buying, I'm going to buy it. If you make it hard or impossible to transfer between my devices, or share with my wife and kids (i.e. how physical media works), you're not getting my money and I'll find another way to get the book.
Authors and editors should be able to live from their work and libgen et al should exist as well. I don't think it's so incomprehensible to imagine that reality because we are living that reality right now. We can also save a lot of money if we get rid of publishers. People will always buy physical books that will be enough to sustain authors, on top of that we can subsidize from taxes. You have to remember that not everyone is a liberal.
The vast majority of authors are not popular enough to live on their works. Publishers actually loose money publishing vast majority of their books, meaning most authors gain value from the publisher since the publisher clearly is loosing money to the author.
Unconditional basic income. Grants for the arts. Stipends. Unconditional basic income. Sponsorships. Unconditional basic income. Donations. Maybe even unconditional basic income.
Look, no artistic endeavor needs to make a billion dollars. Even when something does take a billion dollars in revenue, none of it goes to the artists anyway! Music labels and movie studios and book publishers are infamous for creative accounting and bogus contracts and outright lies to fuck over almost every person that actually contributed to the art. They're worse than politicians. It's all there to funnel even more money to people who are already rich. If you put artists on basic income you're not paying them any less, you're not losing anything, 99.9% of them come out ahead of where they would've been if they'd sold their work for money. Maybe add a couple more nines to that list. For every multimillionaire movie star or generation-defining author there are literally hundreds of thousands of artists just barely scraping by. Capitalist art only benefits the leeches.
If the UBI is high enough for people to live on with no other income, then I think it will be too expensive for the state to avoid going bankrupt as millions of people stop doing productive work to live easy lives.
If it is not enough to live on, then only the independently wealthy can do art, which goes against the exact goal you stated.
> as millions of people stop doing productive work to live easy lives
Or alternately, millions of people will cease busy work which adds no value - and engage in genuinely productive tasks instead. Caring for their families, locally growing food, building collaboratively, teaching and learning form one another. We only reach for succour and addiction when dispirited and alienated. Graeber was far too conservative in his definition of bullshit jobs. The vast mass of us now work in the production of bureaucratic services so far removed from an actual good as to be incalculable. Our work is bullshit, or worse - actively destructive, and we know it.
The amount of money you actually need to live if you're willing to live a spartan lifestyle is quite modest, e.g. sleep four to a room, eat a lot of rice and beans, exist in the absence of luxury.
Most people want more than this and will work for it. But accepting it as a form of sacrifice to achieve your other goals is hardly a problem -- and then people can create their art or start their own business with sweat equity before it generates any revenue etc.
Artists would then get the UBI and whatever they get in terms of patronage, donations, art sales, etc. Neither of which might be enough to live a middle class life on its own, but both together makes it happen. And then the people who make a go of it but never manage to produce "art" anybody cares enough to support at all never make it out of the tenement and retain that incentive to do better or find a different path in life.
That's clearly a false dichotomy, even the post you are replying to outlined a number of ways which an artist might supplement their income.
Also the idea that a significant UBI would lead to people just coasting seems patently false. Every bit of evidence shows that when given the opportunity the majority of individuals are driven to improve the quality of their lives; and also, that quality is measured in relative and not absolute terms.
So, that creates a world (not too dissimilar to our own, but notably so) where only the independently wealthy can ever afford to produce art full time. Can you see any downsides to that world?
It's the same issue. If writers could meaningfully get an audience who buys their work independently, they wouldn't need a publisher.
Publishers offer support and printing, but ultimately an author needs a publisher to spread reach (i won't say "make money", because authors sure won't make much). Becsuse it's all about being loud and publishers have resources to be loud. Much better odds compared to a grassroots community paying a fair price when the author is ready to release.
The problem is that publishers, being the middleman, take over authors the same way the supermarket network takes over the food producers. Publishers own the shelf and a price label, and being less numerous and more organized, they can effectively own the audience's attention. They can help, they can also shut author down. They're not ultimately interested in maximizing availability, because they profit directly from the gap.
That's why they need restrictions and ways around them.
Maybe a billion-dollar company has more money to spend on lawsuits than artists do? Doesn't make them the good guys, but I'm not surprised that it's them doing it.
This is survivorship bias: art owned and protected by wealthy sponsors has a much higher chance of making it through the years. Most art is folk art, and has been lost to the centuries.
The did say "longest lasting art". It feels more survivor bias to mention the Picasso's of history over the many more wealthy who spent their time in the craft.
It's not fair, but it makes sense. And sure the most well known art is not the best art. But a place like this should know the best tech is rarely the most popular product.
Being paid and knowing they can spend their livelihood writing while paying rent is about the best persuasion you can have. Aside from the wealthy who don't need to worry about that.
Yes: we can pay authors nothing. It works. In fact we can make them grovel to get something published, and even get them to pay for the privilege of being considered for the publishing we're offering zero compensation for.
We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.
I've bought multiple physics textbooks which I've first downloaded from libgen. I'm not going to spend 50-100€ of my money on a book before skimming through the contents first. Also some textbooks on niche topics can cost more than 200€ or cannot be found at all.
The alternative would be to make a request for my university library to get the book, but I don't know how long that would take if it would happen at all.
Would the world be a better place if I stuck to studying only the books in local libraries and what I can personally afford? I personally don't think so.
Sounds like a good opportunity to start lobbying to raise library funding, maybe even overhaul it into the 21st century so we can reasonably have a government funded "Netflix of books" of sorts.
Also long term, but it'd kill like, 5 birds with one stone.
> The people who are using libgen, are probably also not the people who would pay an author for a book anyway
Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
The only med books I bought were atlases (histology, anatomy, etc)
Everything else I borrowed, photocopied or bought second hand. Many of my classmates did the same. In our group, very few rich students ever photocopied or bought second hand
If books weren't sold for profit, we would have better books, only released less often. Back then, we didn't have so many yearly releases, and I honestly think that isn't needed.
Why would we have better books you say? Similar to how open source projects draw very good programmers. Some do it for prestige, and some weird ones do it for the joy o f doing true quality work. IMHO
> Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
you take a few interesting leaps in a failed attempt of.... trying to turn opinion into fact?
> the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate.
Uhhh, wot??
Please provide ANY source for this. Really. Like even if it's a blog you wrote and was a creative writing experiment for you, publish it. Just so I can mock you.
> (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
So at this point, I hope it's clear that you are a bit silly. But...
> For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience
This level of intellectual dishonest is horrible, especially if it's legitimate.
I don't think we should make it even worse for them. They are at least going to make some money for their long months or years of work with a chance to make it big.
I think the chance of financial success can incentivize the author to make a better work. Let the authors who are willing to write for free release their work for free.
Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers. Or that most book authors get ridiculous royalties in their publishing contract (a few percent of the price, including for ebooks that are being sold at the price of paper copies) unless they are already famous.
> Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers.
Yes, but most researchers are compensated by either the state, universities or companies hoping to profit of their research. Little high-level research is done for the fun of it.
The secondhand market helps the firsthand market: people are more likely to buy something at the offered price if they know they can resell it on the secondhand market later.
Can you imagine what the automobile market would look like if you couldn't trade-in or sell your car and just had to trash it? New cars sales would plummet.
yes certainly, thank your local library.. your country has them?
> we should encourage and educate people
yes certainly, but many people have had income from a book economy. Some certain books of great quality might increase in price. How can people wish for no-book economy so quickly?
My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.
Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.
As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.
I am pretty sure they do, this data is just too valuable. At least meta admitted using a dataset called "books3" which contains ~200k pirated ebooks for llama 1 and 2 [1].
Anna's archive provides datasets for LLM training, but who knows who they are working with..
I also wonder if google is using their own dataset from books.google.com .
I think this should apply to most essential services (and libgen absolutely is an essential service; others are E2EE messaging and E2EE cloud-hosting). After all, people like to imagine (and are often told) that taxes are not a ransom you pay to the ruling oligarchy, but almost a donation you almost willingly give away for the sake of maintaining public infrastructure.
But the key words are "a better world". I don't think this is really possible in, uh, this world. Imagining a world like that is a bit like a soviet utopian-fantasy book about the world of established communism. "Sounds Good, Doesn't Work".
To be fair, though, if "the government" you are talking about is the one of the USA, I thinks loc.gov is pretty great stuff. I mean, it's pretty shit compared to what somebody like "the Anna" could do with this amount of resources, and it isn't really made in a way to make researching, copying and saving stuff locally easy, but still, I'd love if every country maintained something like that (at least). Lots of relatively rare interesting stuff out there.
I don’t really agree it’s unachievable, just a matter of political will imo. All that would have to happen is enough public interest to outweigh publisher lobbying.
That's because most of them are basically images. I wish they could be gone through and converted to a better format but that's one hell of an undertaking.
> The lawsuit was stalled for months because LibGen’s anonymous operators didn’t respond. With no other viable options left, the publishers filed a motion for a default judgment in their favor.
Narrator: and LibGen’s anonymous operators still didn’t respond
The domain name injunction is interesting, but they want IPFS gateways to comply too, thats odd
but a direct IPFS hash would work, are there any browser extensions that resolve ipfs:// URIs?
So making libgen is illegal, but using it to train LLMs is legal? I know there's a whole issue of transitive liability (maybe you couldn't know you were getting an illegal thing from the thief, so it doesn't always make sense for you to to be liable too), but this kind of thing seems to power way too much of my industry for me to be comfortable.
There's the concept of inducing copyright infringement (a la MGM v. Grokster), so much depends on whether those who train LLMs were inducing libgen's operations in some way, for example if payment or resources were being contributed to libgen.
Welcome to the future! Companies will make illegal or very expensive to access original information, like scientific papers. However, guess what, your friendly AI LLM, trained by your friendly tech monopoly on stollen data, will allow you to access all this research that was paid with your taxes, through monthly payments. But don't ask the AI where it got this information from, because it can get really upset with you...
It's actually amusingly easy to have ChatGPT criticize some OpenAI practice or another. Tell it to do a search for some controversial story, then to "analyze it from an ethical standpoint".
Rule of Capitalism #1: If it is found to be good, but one can't make money off it, it must be made illegal to produce run, then replaced with something that sucks horribly, but can potentially be profitted off of.
I'm not sure I can agree with that, because historically speaking would include the time we had nobility. And in that time period, having money would not provide you with power, as nobles were beyond the law and could simply cease it for themselves.
> maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.
Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection of printed literature on STEM topics, the books have published not for the sake of earning money, also they used to have free libraries among all the villages. This is the closest example I can give and BTW those Russian books are freely published on Russian torrent trackers.
> A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations
Even without any further clarification the search among existing countries is going to return 0 results.
Meanwhile they still have flibusta.is where almost any book ever published in Russian can be downloaded one-click as structured XML (FB2) and the maintainer is dying of brain cancer right now after having paid for the server to run for some more weeks. Russian is among the top languages in terms of the amount of books published in it. Apparently we are witnessing two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time.
Hurry up with downloading these from the website because the Flibusta author has reported on having glioblastoma few days ago, and there is no new leader for the project. The servers are going to be shut down and the good name is going to be spotless because of not reused. Probably this is why you told about "two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time". BTW all 450Gb of Flibusta can be downloaded via torrents but I don't know how to download all of Libgen.
I just hope enough capable people will download everything to be able to create mirrors again someday. Perhaps the darknet can turn out a better place.
Psy* (psychology, psychiatry etc) is neither a science nor a medicine. If your only issue with Soviet regiment is intential usage of psy* pseudoscience then try to search about the Rosenhan experiment.
There is neuroscience though which is a science and can prove things like depression and schizophrenia exist (many distinct kinds of both, possible to distinguish using MRI). Sadly there aren't many neuroscientists and MRI machines available to general public so we still have to rely on psychiatrists for help when our neural system goes awry. In many cases they actually help.
Because it offers the content to everyone anywhere for free without authentication or a limit on the number of concurrent copies available.
Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know, but it is certainly a different point on the continuum than traditional libraries.
> Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know
The actual current status-quo is. Despite the most of the worthy books being available on pirate websites, people still buy books. Publishers still are not bankrupt. Even independent individuals post "I wrote a book" here every now and then, link to DRM-free purchase pages and seem happy.
I personally spent many hundreds dollars buying DRM-free ebooks on GumRoad and HumbleBundle (despite most of them being on LibGen!). I also bought numerous hardcover paper books after reading their pirated ebook versions.
Armchair anarchists aside, it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Money is rarely an incentive for writing a textbook, but it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
>it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators and translators poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Given that, I don't feel too much guilt 'borrowing' from alternate sources.
> I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Publishers give you no lending rights on physical books; legislation and common law give you rights to lend that stem from the first-sale doctrine where I live. Push your legislators (or courts) to establish first-sale doctrine over digital content and there you go.
> it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Why? You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
> it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
There are better ways of supporting work you find important than the parasitic publishing industry and copyright.
> maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't really care, but many different people, for many different reasons.
You may think this specific example, which you seem to think resembles the current publishing industry, negates my overall point, but... not even close.
> The authors of antiquity had no rights concerning their published works; there were neither authors' nor publishing rights. Anyone could have a text recopied, and even alter its contents. Scribes earned money and authors earned mostly glory unless a patron provided cash; a book made its author famous. This followed the traditional concept of the culture: an author stuck to several models, which he imitated and attempted to improve. The status of the author was not regarded as absolutely personal.
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
We are living in the most productive time ever for the book industry, I think comparing the current industry to the past when we produce several orders of magnitude more works that many people highly value is nonsensical.
That point was specifically in response to the suggestion that we need publishers and copyright for books to exist - which is obviously false. Not sure how the size of the current industry relates to that point.
I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive. Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
> I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive.
Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
> Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
> Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing. Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
> Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free. They might not have an editor or translator, but those things cost money. But most authors like money and since most books loose publishers money its not like the author is loosing out.
> That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
I'm glad you liked them. The best fiction works I read I paid for, and trust me I've read a lot of free fiction works.
> Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing.
It's not obvious at all when all you mentioned was quantity (two times in a row). And I think the reason that was all you mentioned is because that's the only 'obvious' increased metric you have. Not to mention, there are many other things that are different now, so chalking it all up to copyright and publishers is illogical.
> Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
Again, you're making claims about 'peak' and 'book health', etc. without actually defining what that means... is it supposed to be 'obvious'?
> Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free.
> You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then? I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing, and it doesn't seem like it's doing so great:
> Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then?
I personally won't, because I've never used it. I am 100% against it being shut down though.
> I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
Read my comment again and find the spot where I said 'nothing'.
> I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing
You can start by defining what 'health of books' even means, but your conclusion here seems seriously perverse.
> how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
What is belittling about acknowledging the fact that current works (especially technical/non-fiction) heavily draw from previous works? The last few technical books I read literally had zero original/unique information - they were just re-organization/re-phrasing/compilation of other works. That's not a bad thing - I think it's great, and the books are great, but is that justification for restricting access to this information - when it is literally 100% based on other works?
If there was a way I could give the authors a few dollars for their work, I totally would. Instead in the system we have, I have to give a publisher $100 so they can give the author $0.50. The publisher uses the money to make rich people richer, and scaring people by suing for violating laws that they themselves wrote.
Whenever possible, I try to but stuff from the authors & creators directly. I haven't been in the market for textbooks in a long time, but even 20 years ago it was a ripoff, and it seems to have only gotten worse.
I'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.
Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.
The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.
I certainly appreciate your efforts, and the efforts of everyone involved. I know a few authors and copy editors, and it seems like an incredible amount of work to deliver the finished product.
I suppose my snark was more in reference to the textbook market, which seems to be the primary focus of Libgen. Academic textbooks seem primarily to be a way to extract some student loan money into publishers' pockets, with plenty of obvious typos, problems that can't be completed, and new editions every year that simply change the order of chapters without fixing any of those issues.
When I was a student, in several of my technical classes, after every test we'd spend a class correcting the answers provided by the textbook that disagreed with more authoritative sources. Spending $100 for a book that was only half right when I could have bought a real technical book for $40 has made me cynical about the whole industry.
I've written numerous technical articles and had to publish them in particular journals for academic promotion/retention reasons, and almost universally the (paid) editors (not the working for free other academic reviewers) added negative value: they introduced errors and I had to spend hours of unnecessary time trying to catch these newly introduced errors, and even then tonnes remained. I distribute the preprints (that paid editors didn't get their hands on) because they're much less error- and typo-ridden then the official published versions.
Anyway, I've got a new list of publishers I'll never publish with, nor use anything they publish as required reading for a class I teach.
Ebook pricing is broken. Sell it for $0.99 and you'll get buyers. You can't sell ebooks when it costs only 5-10% less than a dead-tree hardcover variant. People don't like being ripped off.
Books are far cheaper to print than most people realize. If you see a publisher charging 5-10% less for an ebook than a physical book, it's because they're pricing the ebook at whatever the physical book's price is, minus the printing costs.
Before ebooks came abundant the publishers said some 10% of book price is their money, another 10-15% is for author and editors, and the rest is eaten up by print and distribution+shop. I guess the distribution through publishers' site can be done at 20% of sales price.
The major costs you're missing are marketing and "plate" (up front cost to produce the content). Those make up most of the total costs. For textbooks, the decision makers are professors (so door-to-door sales to get their attention), and the market is pretty small, especially for upper level content (so few units to amortize fixed costs over). Print, paper, and binding are cheap, say ~$10-12 average for a textbook. Typically, distribution channel takes a 20-25%, depending on channel partner, and many colleges mandate that sales go through the school bookstore because they get a cut, so publisher's website isn't necessarily a viable option (without a lot of student marketing). Author royalties run ~13-15% of revenue, and editors hit plate expense (they're publisher employees, so not a variable cost like authors). Textbook publisher Ebitda margins wind up running 20-25%, but most publisher's pay a lot of interest expense, partly because the major costs are up front, and partly because there's been a lot of PE ownership. Net margins can be tight as anyone else's.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
There's a fairly small pool of readers for a niche technical book. Selling it for $0.99 won't meaningfully increase the number of buyers, and it won't recover enough revenue to meet the cost of production.
Sell them at reasonable prices and people will buy them.
Ever seen someone photocopying an entire newspaper? Guess what would happen if newspapers prices suddenly were inflated to like 50 bucks.
The reality is that without the existence of publishers the price of almost all texts would drift toward a minimum far below the worthwhileness of any author.
So maybe, like art, texts will become sheer passion projects - even technical texts. Otherwise, I'm sure LLMs will be able to replace their usefulness soon.
The fact that artists/writers pearl clutch over their already non lucrative jobs while software folks are gleeful to sell their own earning potential out from under themselves shows you that artists/writers are wannabe Bolshevik’s and that software folks are the only honest “egalitarians” out there.
Is there a legal alternative to illegal projects like Libgen? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Easily is the operative word. Blockbuster was easy but you had to drive there -- netflix is easier. Libraries similarly require driving (unless you use overdrive / similar) but piracy is easier for many as well. Books just haven't found their spotify/netflix; the kindle store is basically 2009 itunes.
I don't think many realize how much libraries have via internet ("overdrive / similar") these days. You don't even have to show up in person to sign up at my local library.
Libgen and the like tend to just have more on hand though, and that's the big differentiator in usability IMO. There are things your local library just isn't going to have a copy of but libgen will. After that happens once, why bother with the library again? Outside of "it's legal" or "I find more moral" type concepts there tends not to be a strong reason.
> Is there a legal alternative? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Plenty of books (and other written works, such as serial publications) are in the public domain, hence fully legal from a copyright POV. However discovery is still a major problem: many works in the public domain are still far from being easily findable or accessible online. (Even then, it's worth keeping in mind that the books people generally think of as the 'Greatest Books of the Western Canon' are, by and large, in the public domain, and that already is more books than you could feasibly read in a lifetime.)
Many but not remotely enough books are in the public domain. Copyright terms are now ridiculously long—the last Sherlock Holmes stories only just entered public domain.
It would be very hard to profit from that? Because at most people would read few books a month. How much would they pay for it? Competition is literally libraries for free. Music or Movies dont't have free competitors. There would be long term tech cost, 100s of employees and all. The math is very hard even for long term.
The Internet Archive's 'Lending Library' does this, but suffered a major blow in the recent copyright case. It's really a big advance in human knowledge, and works as simply as you say (you need to use their online viewer or an Adobe DRM client).
That are not for technical books, and Amazon used to be famous for deleting a book from used's devices. It is not exactly fare to compale an honest source of technical books which allows anyone to download some rare tech books with a source of DRM which requires me to deal with something not exactly reading. Just look at those websites - who is that visitor of libgen website who needs those animations?
> like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Libgen is not Netflix for books, it is thepiratebay for books. Libgen is not helpful in discovering more books because if to judge about those literature which is abundant on Libgen, the technical one, what allows user to discover some books on Libgen is only another books or your interest to specific scientist or field.
(I know there are a lot of fiction materials on Libgen such as comicses but all I use to read is science books or at least some non-fiction, so my opinion may be biased).
Now, can someone help explain to me how I can ask LibGen (or Google, or my ISP) to refund me the thousands of dollars I’ve lost in royalties on the 7 books of mine they have up there?
libgen and z-library must be Russia's greatest philanthropic contribution to the rest of mankind (despite all the other dodgy stuff it is involved in, which I am not belittling).
It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view: knock out a hugely profitable business (textbook publishing) of you adversary while increasing your soft power by 100x due to the unpopularity of said industry.
There are surely loads of artists and independent technical authors who got screwed by it which I am not diminishing, but this is more than dwarfed by the benefit to the hundred of millions around the world especially from developing countries who can't afford to pay $100+ for a textbook on essential topic like organic chemistry or electrical engineering. In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to submit the book to the open domain.
While the founders may have their origins in the Soviet Union (and not Russian), I don’t think the site has anything todo with the Russian government. Rather, it’s the reaction of some individuals to the difficult and expensive access to literature in the west.
As a Russian, I agree in the part that it seems extremely unlikely our government would even think about doing something like this. (Wikipedia says it started explicitly in 1990’s RuNet though, which I am inclined to believe.)
A further issue that’s often overlooked in English-language discussion is Russian-language books.
A lot of specialist scientific literature such as monographs only saw a single run of 300, 1000, or at best 3000 copies in the Soviet Union, and that’s it. If you’d missed it and didn’t have access to one of a handful of libraries that had it, tough luck. (To give an idea of what counts as specialist, the foremost textbook on general relativity, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, was translated into Russian in 1977 and had a single 3000-copy print run. The 1973 English original is still in print.)
Furthermore, when the Soviet Union fell, so for the most part did the publishing houses, and nobody knows where the offset printing films for the books went. So nobody can print Soviet books again without typesetting them from scratch, even those that weren’t rare. (Did you know that the new Russian edition of Gradshtein and Ryzhik’s special functions manual is technically a translation from Russian to English to Russian? Or so it says on the copyright page, anyway.)
In that environment, having widely available scans of books was absolutely vital; for those who teach students fresh out of high school who don’t necessarily know enough English, it still is. Today’s LibGen arose as an amalgamation of a number of those efforts from the early days of the Russian-speaking Internet.
One was maintained (unofficially) by people from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Another was mirrored (unofficially) by a Moscow-based particle physics institute that until several years ago originated a large part of the Russian presence at CERN. I’m sure other Russian-speaking research centers contributed just as much or more, I’m just not familliar with that part of the history.
As Russian-language scientific publishing stagnated, and subscriptions to English-language literature by and large did not materialize (what with them costing most of a typical money-starved institute’s budget), obtaining scanned and ebook versions of English-language literature from Western acquaintances became more important. People gradually unified under LibGen’s banner, and here we are.
And yes, none of this ever got government support, as far as I know.
Yes this has been a misdirection from the publishers for a while that even some librarians are repeating (other things are supposedly stolen credentials used to do more than just getting access to publications).
Russian government not caring about enforcing western corporation's copyright does play a big role.
I wonder how successful Russian companies are at enforcing their IP in the US? I’ll venture a guess that the US is not helpful either.
I think you’re overstating how much anyone knows or cares that Libgen is Russian (if that is a correct categorization). Also, as you imply, the hurt to publishers may be overstated - a download is not a lost sale.
> a download is not a lost sale
It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.
> It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.
An ancedote is not the same as data.
(Legal) libraries had an effect of increasing sales, much to the surprise of everyone when they were first introduced. Its entirely possible that piracy could have too. Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows. I think the effects are non-obvious enough that actual studies are needed to know what the actual affect is.
I, on the other hand, have never purchased anything I was going to pirate if I couldn't find it. So for me it definitely is not correlated. If I couldn't find it I just moved on. I tend to pirate nice to haves.
Everybody's different. For me, an inverse correlation happens: libgen etc. act as a bookshop where I can freely browse and evaluate stuff before I buy. So I want to make sure I'm not cheated.
Sometimes the brand is enough, i.e. I know by experience that if a book is from Manning I can trust it, whereas if it's from Packt it's hit-or-miss-but-probably-miss. Self-published ones? 90% are worthless, 1% are gems with the rest on the verge. You can't really know this from reading a sample chapter or the ToC.
Hm... Once in a while, I buy things that I previously downloaded.
Not specialized scientific literature, I will never contribute to Springer's bottom line. But many books and films.
Sharing is marketing. Microsoft executed this beautifully under Gates, this is the reason №1 they are so dominant now.
Reviling sharing by relabelling it as pirating while still profiting from it on a different level is a good old strategy.
> I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.
What if you don’t have the money for the purchase? You’d never buy the thing if you couldn’t get it for free.
But at the same time, I think you can definitely say that it’s often like a lost sale.
Not sure how you missed this from my previous comment, but here it is again
> Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated
>>> a download is not a lost sale
>> It very much is. => FALSE (my opinion)
>> Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. => TRUE (my opinion)
> I think you can definitely say that it’s often like a lost sale. => TRUE (my opinion)
Sorry for being a nuisance and getting caught up in semantics. I think we're mostly in agreement, my bad.
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My wife would not be able to do her PhD without LibGen
People don’t understand how hard and expensive it is to legitimately access research articles if you’re from a developing poor country
Can she not get any inter library loan?
I don't think it was a strategic move any more than scihub (also originating in Russia) was
Also, IRC channels with many thousands of textbooks have been around for decades (and have nothing to do with Russia)
people overestimate the capabilities of the corrupt russian government to an absurd degree. Piracy is rampant in russia because it s not suppressed there. VK is full of all the movies you can think of.
> It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view:
Why elevate what is likely the work of a few committed private individuals to the level of some strategic state conspiracy?
My thoughts exactly; I recall stumbling across libgen back in 2018 - it even had a user forum; back then it was clearly just a one-person operation. I got the impression it was someone who liked collecting, organising and sharing PDFs that interested them. And then with time it, the site blew up in popularity.
Occam's razor is strong here
PDFs also have a scripting language built in, right? Could that be a good attack vector?
It seems like a pretty good site to attack people from, for social reasons. It sits at a nice confluence of: technically unauthorized copying, but feels like not such a big deal. And getting academic papers can be a PITA. And the audience is probably self-selecting for folks who are doing interesting STEM stuff.
Surely at this point your average pdf viewer is sandboxed to hell and back? (Eg your browser).
If I wanted to run JS in someone’s browser I don’t need a pdf to do it.
I guess I’m thinking of somebody like myself, like I’ve known forever the prudent thing to do is disable JavaScript on my browser wherever possible. But I didn’t know PDFs had a built in scripting language until a couple years ago, I mostly use PDF for papers, where this isn’t as relevant.
In principle, any piece of software can have zero-days in it. PDF readers included.
Scripting languages can help with certain exploits, but arent vulnerabilities in and of themselves.
Anyhow, theoretically possible but also kind of unlikely. Such attacks usually have a shortish shelf life so are used in more targeted fashion to prolong the exploits life and get the most value from it.
Libgen is Russian?
Actually not sure about LibGen in its current manifestation, but the wikipedia page clearly traces its origin and earlier iterations to Russia
More like post-Soviet. Regardless of the country of operation (which included e.g. Ecuador at some point, in which the owner of lib.rus.ec, the predecessor of libgen, moved), all these shadow libraries and knowledge preservation attempts represent consistent political action by the individuals with views formed by samizdat and the Soviet/post-crash reading culture. That includes Sci-Hub, Libgen, and those most never heard about but which were extremely influential, like the SU.BOOKS BBS or lib.ru.
I don't think there's any evidence of that, it's just supposition based on them being unable to locate them.
There is a lot of evidence that it was originally made by someone Russian-speaking, starting from the fact that initial LibGen collection was some Russian and English literature taken from a Russian torrent-tracker. However I'm sure there was "no strategic point of view" whatsoever, just a pet project by some kind-hearted people.
You can read some other research here - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/2603....
(And I also have some very brief "scene" knowledge from circa 2010-2012, which confirms the fact, but you'll have to trust my word for it.)
Is there a difference betwixt treating supposition as implicit fact and deliberate misinformation?
Intent is easier to falsify than impact, generally.
American's still very much buy into the super-villain complex regarding Russia drilled into them over the decades.
Yes, Putin does all kind of shit, but this ... please, the national security interest card from copyright holders has been an evergreen.
I love that this perspective completely misses the point in the light of GenAI, the greatest appropriation of all human creation by large american tech companies, destroying untold commercialisation.
Can't have one discusson without the other.
Sounds like how Temu is killing dollar stores and mom and pop e-commerce stores here in the states
The majority of these "mom and pop e-commerce stores here in the states" are dropshipping enterprises that deserve to die.
> Hoping for a better outcome, textbook publishers Cengage, Bedford, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education
The same companies pushing subscription models, restrictive e-book licensing, bundling, single-use codes, needless revisions, and anything else they can do to eliminate the first sale doctrine (and with it third party used textbook sales and rentals) and extract more money from students.
On the modern internet, you don't need to know who runs it in order to shut it down. They already have a court order to pull down all of the known domains and the registrars have 20 days to comply.
If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)
Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
They're not on TOR because normal people aren't on TOR. We've had various ways to distribute files with almost no way of getting caught for decades, but they're all a pain in the ass to use, requiring at the very least a native client program to access, so most people won't ever use them.
Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.
That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.
We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc.
I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.
> Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry
Second class how? I open the tor browser, I paste the link, I go there.
Even simpler, advertise your onion domain by including a Onion-Location header in the clear-net site’s response.
The Tor Browser automatically detects and offers to redirect you there. No need to memorize the onion domain.
That sounds like a pretty nice place to add malware to a site once it's hacked and avoid detection.
This was the original purpose of the alt-svc[1] header, although it's rarely used for that purpose and instead used for upgrading clients to QUIC.
[1] https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor...
You can't just lay out a supposed fact that 99% of users don't care about speed without providing some sort of citation...
I think you misread, I read it as 99% of users don't care about anonymity
> Why aren't … operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
> They’re not on TOR because
Any downsides to being available on many decentralized overlay networks in addition to plain https, other than (compute/net/human) resources?
no advertising $
Do they even have advertising normally?
yes i believe so
Anna doesn't have any advertising. Their income is purely driven off donations, most of which are part of subscription packages that offer faster downloads.
yeah meant more libgen, which i believe some instances have ads.
anna's has "donations for speed" and dark pattern hide the links to the fast external websites
Doesn't z-lib have a kind of hybrid approach where some things are available on clearnet but for certain account-based features it's TOR?
I believe this should work: <http://genotypeinczgrxr.onion/>
Via: <https://old.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/mqo0sg/tor_onion_po...>.
The sites are ON Tor. They were not exclusively on Tor for reasons others have stated: most people don't have Tor or know how to use it, though I suspect that situation may evolve.
"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.
The Web hasn't required anything beyond what's installed for nearly the entirety of my life, and when it wasn't already there, someone would toss a CD at me in the parking lot and I'd be golden
You hang out in unusual parking lots.
Talkin AOL baby!
Edit: But admittedly I do hang out in some unusual parking lots.
I use libgen on tor.
> I use libgen on tor.
I believe the context here is the GGP's comment about using Tor Onion services. Are you using those to access libgen?
Is this [0] not exclusively for the Tor browser? It states immediately below (on this [1] page) to "Make sure you're using Tor", and will only open in the Tor browser. I've actually used LibGen with Tor before, and treat it like the library not making ones borrowing history public knowledge
[0] http://libgenfrialc7tguyjywa36vtrdcplwpxaw43h6o63dmmwhvavo5r...
[1] http://library.lol/fiction/33618E71454C5165A39564CB861466AB
There are obvious workaround for all of the things you mention.
> Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
Probably because that would make it less accessible and more slow.
We're are talking about PDFs. A few mb usually. The speed hit of tor is probably fine. Also its a text book. Most users probably find some download latency acceptable.
I imagine the real reason is normies dont have tor installed.
Not a fan of the term “normies” but as a Tor “normie” isn’t Tor traffic identifiable and wouldn’t using it make it easier for authorities to focus on you?
Yes, but in most western juridsictions using tor is acceptable so that is fine.
There are ways to disguise traffic (onfuscated bridges) but those are always going to be an arms race.
You only need a dynamic-DNS system on the hidden service. Then you can avoid the regulatory capture of registrars and host in a friendly country.
For now. Right now DNS blocking is used because it works for 95% of people. Once it doesn't, they'll start demanding more serious means of blocking.
I'm surprised that didn't happen yet because DNS blocking is so ineffective. It's basically just akin to removing a business from the phone book or yellow pages.
AA is purely an indexer, the performance hit would be more felt during the actual downloads.
Like when they shut down The Pirate Bay in 2006 (and again every year since)?
They are available over IPFS and you can download their datadump via Torrent
Their datadump strategy is questionable. You end up needing perhaps 1 book for each shard. I guess they are made by sorting the ISBN or some other numerical field and then grouped until they reach a certain size. It is a bit annoying to put the shard of interest to download in your torrent client, pause it, figure out which book is the one you are after by looking at the ids, instruct your torrent client to only download that book.
My understanding was that's meant to be a way "ordinary people" () can contribute to the project by seeding one or more torrents with a part of their archive contents, to try and achieve a sort of "distributed backup", and it's not meant as a way for final users to get that one book they need.
() that is, people that can't run a IPFS node or other advanced options due to their limited space/network/skills/money.
> Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
I’d assume is maximizing access to genpop
TOR comes with it's own baggage.
Does TOR still allow anyone to run relay / exit nodes? It's only safe inasmuch as security agencies want to keep using their access when they need to.
That's irrelevant if you are talking about hidden services.
And mostly irrelavent for clearnet in a world where everything is https.
In this case it's not the privacy you need from ToR but access so it doesn't really matter if the NSA runs the exit nodes because you're not exiting.
China proved the Great Firewall was possible. It is only a matter of time before every nation builds it for the benefit of their ruling classes.
> China proved the Great Firewall was possible.
Technologically? Maybe. Practically? I'm posting this while using uncensored Internet from within China, and not because I'm going out of my way to evade any blocking.
The GFW is more like the government put out an umbrella, but nothing is really forcing anyone to stand under it. Five steps and you're out. No doubt they could change that tomorrow if they so wished, but there are hurdles other than technical ones.
In my case I'm simply roaming using my German SIM-card, but plenty of VPNs would work too. They can detect and block these and do with certain ones, but for many they just... don't.
Isn't it the case that foreigners can just apply to be exempted from the GFW? I remember people mentioning that to me online in the 2010s who were semi-long term living in China.
I don't think that's necessary as app stores are already regional and easy to put additional restrictions on, and desktop internet usage is slowly being overtaken by app usage. And who knows, maybe even Windows 15 will only allow software downloaded through Safe and Verified(tm) app stores.
We already see mass censorship of legal speech via centralization and deplatforming, particularly via Cloudflare (which continues to happily host CSAM, animal SAM, and various other genuinely illegal websites). It is the unfortunate reality that the Internet will become various internets.
Good luck convincing a russian registrar to comply with US court orders!
They wouldn't be as accessible to the average user.
Why should they? They are also on tor.
Post the Anna's Archive tor link and I will send you 5 USDC
It seems that you are correct, there is none. I thought that they did have one.. perhaps a book mirror only.
> Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
I think hosting in country outside of US jurisdiction (Russia?) and being accessed through VPN is more consumer friendly solution.
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Even if they get the whole site taken down, I'm pretty sure whoever operates it can just deploy the same thing to any number of other domains. The actual server infrastructure would need to be taken offline, which it sounds like they don't have enough information to do.
Yeah seems kind of like a futile effort, even the piratebay is (somehow) still online to this day.
Do you really believe that? Stuff like that is really troublesome to keep alive. Piratebay is hardly the thing is was, and it's a torrent site, which is relatively easy to host. A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore. They only exist because of almost fanatical dedication of some highly productive individuals, god bless them. Even if they don't get into serious trouble, it's still a hassle to avoid getting into trouble and work with actual content, not just host a bunch of torrent-links other people provide. So, at some point they'll lose the desire to do that, and I am not so sure that there always will be somebody to take post.
In fact, I even worry a bit about what will happen to Linux when Torvalds finally passes away, and for sure Linux depends on him much less so than all those pirate resources on the people who maintain them.
> A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore.
There you go, ruining my evening again. Hope you're happy, making an old man cry.
What happens when the key leadership retires/dies? No one has ever found a solution to this problem. It is not novel nor simple, and certainly not exclusive to any group, project, or institution.
Gradually scale back your [great] leadership and find people to do well defined small parts of it. The dynamic flexible structure becomes rigid and decays much more slowly.
Eventually even the top tasks can be strictly defined and frozen in time.
look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
I mean it's not literally about the piratebay or libgen, or napster or whatever. I think historically it's true to say that it never really mattered how much effort they invest in destroying piracy. The fact that storage gets cheaper, yet text won't grow in size over time also makes me rather optimistic. Piracy was also always a decentralized effort by like-minded individuals, it's about the idea, you can arrest people, seize a name and people die, but an idea will never die.
Piracy of books in particular has been around since the 17th century btw, if that helps to convey why I'm not worried.
the running joke is to call it the organization.
i coin a protocol in 2005 and in 2007 i•ve combined 6 torrents into one archive. Clearly Im an upstanding member of the organization.
It keeps the lawyers employed
With old torrents, nothing compared to its heyday. I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now. 5-10 years ago it used to me newzbins and demonoid
> I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now
I don't know what DHTs it's pulling from, but BitMagnet lets me find LOTS of cool, obscure stuff.
tpb is not really still extant
In a sense it doesn't anymore true, in another I just downloaded a recent Ubuntu ISO just this week from it. You get what I mean.
Is there a reason to get Ubuntu from anywhere other than the torrent found at ubuntu.com?
Perhaps ubuntu.com is blocked in your country.
Lookup Linux iso in the urban dictionary
I'm sure it's less popular, but I heard you can google pirate bay proxies and get on there in 2 minutes. Not that I would ever do such an immoral and illegal thing, depriving publishers of their hard-earned dollars! But from what I've heard you can still get any recent media and a lot of older stuff.
The really annoying thing is that libgen is often the only place one can actually get a book.
Even when you're in a major international market like the United States it's frequently the case that books are nearly unobtainable, especially if they're older or limited printings of specialist material. Sometimes I'll get recommended an old SF book or a particular reference manual and it turns out that it had one run in 1985 and there are four copies available on the used market at prices between three hundred and three thousand dollars. Tons of works are one minor complication, like living in the southern hemisphere or not being rich, away from being effectively non-existent.
Right?! I have a PocketBook, their store is absolutely useless, I can’t read anything with DRM, even had to return paid for books because I couldn’t get that adobe crap working on Linux. It’s drm-free or libgen for me.
I was considering getting one but your comment worries me. Do you have an older device? I thought the device itself could do the DRM if you threw an acsm file at it?
Hmm, never tried that. What's the use of the DRM if it would work?
The most frustrating is that store, even searching for the most popular books yields weird, useless results for me.
You can borrow e-books from libraries, but they come with DRM which means that they can manage “loans” and “returns” so they have a nominal number of books to lend out.
Quite a good service actually, called Libby. There are obviously ways to remove the DRM and make just a normal ePub but I’d quite like not to have to do that if I don’t have to.
https://annas-archive.org/datasets/lgrs
It would seem they would be an even bigger target given they accept funds for "fast" downloads.
EDIT: btw, I tried to use anna's archive a few times and couldn't download the files. Something always broke before it finished. Definitely a way less good experience compared to libgen.
Anna's Archive is being sued, the court case has been going on for months [1].
Unlike this Libgen court case, they likely identified the owner, Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo. It's not just another court case against anonymous unidentified persons. They found her due to her poor opsec (nickname was anarchivist), so it may shut down soon.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68157923/oclc-online-co...
Weirdly, the lawsuit is not from book publishers, but by the owners of WorldCat, a book metadata database she scraped and uploaded.
IIRC, there is very little real evidence to link Maria to Anna's Archive, and AFAIK we're still waiting for more proof on that.
This is a civil suit, so only a >50% likelihood of guilt is required. The circumstantial evidence is pretty convincing IMO unfortunately.
1. The name, Anna's - Anasztasia.
2. That Anasztasia has the nickname Anarchivist and is a self-described archivist.
3. That Anasztasia had a GitHub WorldCat scraping project.
Perhaps there were more things I forgot. Her personal blog writing reads very similar to the AA blog to me too. I unfortunately think they've found the AA owner.
Thankfully Anna's Archive is fully open-source, so it'll likely live past this civil case in some way.
> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.
How are they even able to stay anonymous if they're using google ads? I assume they have to provide a bank account to get paid, and with all the KYC laws it's not exactly trivial to hide your identity.
There are online vendors who will lease out their AdX accounts. The industry is rife with fraud.
Meh. Not really.
Sure, but how do you even keep it sustainable? All most useful things in the world are kinda fundamentally non-monetizable, illegal, or both. Wikipedia is the only thing that succeeded, and even that I'm starting to have some doubts about, because of how heavily politically influenced it is.
Reminds me of the Nintendo Switch emulator developers setting up a Patreon.
Ryujinx still has a patreon so running a patreon is not what solely did them in.
I didn't mean to imply that. It just doesn't seem to have helped their case very much.
The biggest vulnerability for hackers has always been trying to get normie clout for our actions. Whether back in the day from pure social bragging, or now from trying to tie in to contemporary surveillance media. It's painful to watch, but if they had been more reserved you likely wouldn't hearing about them in the first place.
I don't know man, plenty of hackers manage to get by and get eyes on their work without getting sued.
Really depends. Worst thing you can do as a hacker is have a brand. Anything more than "that guy who did X" is putting you as a flight risk for corporate.
You can't put a face or even handle on yourself, ideally. But that's all social media is these days.
While I see googletagmanager embedded on the .li site I don't think they can tell if you click the download link or just viewed the page for a book, at least.
tag manager can inject scripts that can observe pretty much why interaction with the site
Don't kids use TOR anymore these days?
You mean man in the middle deeply suspicious project maintained by who knows who which promotes itself as privacy protecting service.
The people running Tor for intel don’t give a damn about you downloading “C Structures for the Down and Out” or “Horus Lupercal, Saint or Savior—Another Take”, they have bigger fish to fry and don’t need that distraction
For those readers wondering if “ C Structures for the Down and Out” is a real book: please be patient. Claude is writing it as we speak.
I mean, the latter seems to be a bit heretical. In fact, inquisitors have been dispatched to get rid of that. The Emperor Protects!
---
But that is a good point. It's doubtful that the intelligence community would care too much about people downloading books in the TOR Network. Or if they did get an interest in that, it works have to be a very special book, indeed.
TOR doesn't man in the middle your traffic. An exit node could snoop your traffic if it's unencrypted, but no TOR nodes can see into a encrypted TLS stream, for example.
Yabbut, why burn your « reputation » as a privacy protecting service by taking down book pirates?
Parallel construction is legal in the USA
The names and backgrounds of all of the people maintaining Tor are easily found.
I’m not sure using it is illegal.
Yes - don't take my advice, but isn't the precedent with BitTorrent piracy that downloaders aren't gone after, only uploaders?
So the distinction is, using bittorrent is not illegal (yet). It's just a protocol for sharing files. But using it as a tool for illegal activity is illegal, because youre doing something illegal.
The same applies to Tor, for now.
No, it's not. They go after downloaders as well. I speak from experience. :)
No. It just depends on the jurisdiction you are in. It's not illegal where I am located.
> “Plaintiffs have been irreparably harmed as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct and will continue to be irreparably harmed should Defendants be allowed to continue operating the Libgen Sites”, the order reads.
What is the evidence?
There is no evidence. Because the defendants have remained anonymous, the court issues what’s called a “default judgment.” Essentially this means that since the defendants’ did not present their case, the court is obliged to accept the plaintiffs’ case as-is.
They typoed libgen for linkedin in the article
> n the order, McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer domains to publishers' control or "otherwise implement technical measures, such as holding, suspending, or canceling the domain name to ensure the domain names cannot be used" for further copyright infringement.
I think taking down linkedin would be overall better for humanity...
It's a pretty good OSINT tool for threat actors to map out your operation imho
How can there be any doubt?
It once helped me, romantically. Over dinner, my date said "I'm glad LinkedIn is good for something."
On the balance though, ya, shut it down.
Unfortunately the court order doesn’t have that typo. ;)
Yes that confused me for a while.
Url changed from https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m..., which points to this.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am connecting from India and I already can't access the original libgen sites (libgen.rs, libgen.st). Indian ISPs waste no time in blocking websites at the first indication, even when the people requesting have no jurisdiction on them.
Two decades ago, a full-tuition scholarship allowed me to attend a wealthy private US university. After my first semester of expensive book purchases, I was on broke and on academic probation (partially from working so much to afford living expenses!).
Fortunately, a friend showed me how to purchase identical-edition textbooks from Indian/SriLankan publishers — written in English and with valid online access codes. Including shipping, textbooks from this source were identical material (on cheaper paper) but only cost 20% of US publisher prices.
On recollection, I'm sure this was somehow illegal/contraband; but looking at it it decades later it still feels like academia/publishers are robbing the majority of students with their prices (just like healthcare... taxes... etc.).
Is there any way for us individuals to help libgen? Some sort of ipfs distributed storage? It would be a tragedy if it was lost. It's an essential resource for scientists and for bibliophiles!
I've recently stopped buying books from publishers that engage in this shitfuckery (Elsevier, Springer, etc). This frees almost 1000 EUR/year that I'd love to steer towards libgen, sci-hub and similar initiatives. But not for paying these stupid fines, of course.
Libgen was ultimately a workaround to an endemic industry issue. Ideally all of the US folk here get a bill running to get better consumer rights for the media we consume, so we wouldn't have to run into such invasive DRM that can render your purchase unusable.
Not much to do about the cost though. Textbooks specifically can charge this much because the target is education, not the layman.
There exist torrent archives of everything on libgen, you can theoretically download the whole catalog. I think it's their backup strategy.
libgen is backed up by annas-archive and you can help seed the torrents https://annas-archive.org/datasets https://annas-archive.org/torrents
Not entirely sure why this was dead. This is the answer to GP's question.
Thanks, was looking for something like this. With all the hardware I'm sure is sitting idle under HN users, we could make a big contribution for ~free.
It's disappointing to see how they cannot see what it means for libgen to exist in the broader sense.
Books should be free for all, and we should encourage and educate people to donate back the value they received from them
> donate back the value they received from them
Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think
An obvious candidate in this case would be the pro-rata share of the cost of creation. Possibly offset by ability to pay, e.g. if you can afford to pay a little more then do so because some people can't afford to pay as much and you still want the overall total to cover the cost.
It's an eternal struggle. The "perfect capitalist" wants infinite money with zero cost labor. The "perfect consumer" wants high quality products for free delivered instantly.
Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.
There is no pricing that would satisfy the person you are responding to other than free.
"Price" is not being used in a completely literal sense here. The core of the comment is how to calculate "value they received", and neither person involved would say it's $0.
I fully understand what they are saying. I'm saying it doesn't matter. There is a group of people that believe anything above free is too much. For both software and books.
If you're talking about people that think nothing should be paid, then kundi is not one of those people, and you're responding in the wrong place.
If you're talking about people that think payment should be optional but encouraged, then your "There is no pricing that would satisfy the person" "it doesn't matter" argument is incorrect. It does matter to those people and you can have a productive discussion about the correct amount.
Encouraging people to donate does nothing. People are encouraged to donate to open source and you see how many open source projects the internet depends on that are wildly underfunded. Maybe you believe people are more charitable than I do.
This is an entirely different conversation though, and it doesn't invalidate the conversation they were having earlier about the correct amount.
There is a group of people that believe getting less money than the maximum they can is too little. Let's not base business models on extremes. For example, Humble Bundle has shown there are other ways.
You haven't used Humble Bundle lately have you? They increased their minimums on the bundle and increased their required cut. Now, did they do this because they are hurting for money or for greed? I don't know.
...And they aren't unreasonable when these things have been rendered non-rivalrous goods.
Tell me, what price should your parents have charged you for teaching you to tie your shoes? To cook? To clean? Get back to me when the cost of digital reproduction requires factories, and trucking fleets, and paper mills. Oh wait... It doesn't. It requires transliteration to the written word, document layout, and maybe a little marketing so the world knows it's there.
If the paper book can be delivered for $8.99, there is no excuse for the ebook to be $8.99 per reader en perpetuity. Even Thomas Jefferson bloody understood that concept 200 years ago. One who lights their own candle off of another's leaves the one who was lit off of none the worse. So to with knowledge. The owners of industrial printing presses are just terrified of the possibility of the dawn of their own irrelevance. So they dump what money they get in creating artificial information asymmetries to exploit tor profit. And therein lay the root of all evil.
> Books should be free for all
Most books that are in the public domain today (hence with no legal hindrances whatsoever) are still not meaningfully free or available to all. Copyright turns out to be simply a minor issue when viewed in a larger perspective; actually making works meaningfully available whenever this can be done free of legal issues is actually a lot more important. Note that this encompasses discovery and findability (e.g. through detailed cataloging) as well as practical access (e.g. through availability in a variety of open formats). It's a hard problem and one that's far from being comprehensively addressed.
Do the same people who think that every line of code ever written should be free; also think that every book, article, or painting should also be free?
Or are there people who draw lines and say that one type of work product should always be free while it is OK to charge for another?
Maybe get back to the original 20 years of copyright protection instead of the insane “70 years after death of the author” that has been made solely for the interest of the IP holders?
All my code (that isn't owned by a business, contractually) is free (well, technically I have a couple of private repos, but they're not paid access, they're just not available). So are all of the translation and commission work I did: people were paying to choose what I'd do next, not to keep something exclusive for themselves.
Corporatism is going to be the death of art, because we've normalized the idea that art is an ancillary function of some business project that first and foremost wants to generate profit.
they might suggest various other revenue models aside from royalties.
For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact
My code could effectively be free. The thing is most consumers don't care for code, they care for products. So I don't think open sourcing a currently closed source project would impact 99% of tech out there.
Eh idk but books should definitely be free. We can talk about the rest once the books are free.
So if authors refuse to spend the time and resources needed to get a work ready for publication because they will be denied any compensation for doing so; should they be forced to write them anyway so that you can have your free books?
What's the purpose of this question? Their answer is almost certainly "no", and that doesn't contradict anything they've said in this conversation.
Correct yes I totally want to make authors into literal slaves.
Fiendish; the most clever part is that authors who are already slaves to their own creative urges may not notice any change.
Let's say books are free like they should be. What about water? Housing? (Public) Transportation?
I think the creator of a book should be able to charge for their work if they desire to do so for a reasonable amount of time, actually, especially considering most authors don't make a lot of money form their works.
I don't even mind paying up front anymore. I'm in a position where I can afford it now, though for most of my adult life I've relied on sites like this to make ends meet.
However the only thing I want from publishers is DRM-free e-books (same for music). If you offer a way for me to actually own the digital property I'm buying, I'm going to buy it. If you make it hard or impossible to transfer between my devices, or share with my wife and kids (i.e. how physical media works), you're not getting my money and I'll find another way to get the book.
How should authors get paid? What about editors?
Authors and editors should be able to live from their work and libgen et al should exist as well. I don't think it's so incomprehensible to imagine that reality because we are living that reality right now. We can also save a lot of money if we get rid of publishers. People will always buy physical books that will be enough to sustain authors, on top of that we can subsidize from taxes. You have to remember that not everyone is a liberal.
The vast majority of authors are not popular enough to live on their works. Publishers actually loose money publishing vast majority of their books, meaning most authors gain value from the publisher since the publisher clearly is loosing money to the author.
Unconditional basic income. Grants for the arts. Stipends. Unconditional basic income. Sponsorships. Unconditional basic income. Donations. Maybe even unconditional basic income.
Look, no artistic endeavor needs to make a billion dollars. Even when something does take a billion dollars in revenue, none of it goes to the artists anyway! Music labels and movie studios and book publishers are infamous for creative accounting and bogus contracts and outright lies to fuck over almost every person that actually contributed to the art. They're worse than politicians. It's all there to funnel even more money to people who are already rich. If you put artists on basic income you're not paying them any less, you're not losing anything, 99.9% of them come out ahead of where they would've been if they'd sold their work for money. Maybe add a couple more nines to that list. For every multimillionaire movie star or generation-defining author there are literally hundreds of thousands of artists just barely scraping by. Capitalist art only benefits the leeches.
If the UBI is high enough for people to live on with no other income, then I think it will be too expensive for the state to avoid going bankrupt as millions of people stop doing productive work to live easy lives.
If it is not enough to live on, then only the independently wealthy can do art, which goes against the exact goal you stated.
> as millions of people stop doing productive work to live easy lives
Or alternately, millions of people will cease busy work which adds no value - and engage in genuinely productive tasks instead. Caring for their families, locally growing food, building collaboratively, teaching and learning form one another. We only reach for succour and addiction when dispirited and alienated. Graeber was far too conservative in his definition of bullshit jobs. The vast mass of us now work in the production of bureaucratic services so far removed from an actual good as to be incalculable. Our work is bullshit, or worse - actively destructive, and we know it.
The amount of money you actually need to live if you're willing to live a spartan lifestyle is quite modest, e.g. sleep four to a room, eat a lot of rice and beans, exist in the absence of luxury.
Most people want more than this and will work for it. But accepting it as a form of sacrifice to achieve your other goals is hardly a problem -- and then people can create their art or start their own business with sweat equity before it generates any revenue etc.
Artists would then get the UBI and whatever they get in terms of patronage, donations, art sales, etc. Neither of which might be enough to live a middle class life on its own, but both together makes it happen. And then the people who make a go of it but never manage to produce "art" anybody cares enough to support at all never make it out of the tenement and retain that incentive to do better or find a different path in life.
That's clearly a false dichotomy, even the post you are replying to outlined a number of ways which an artist might supplement their income.
Also the idea that a significant UBI would lead to people just coasting seems patently false. Every bit of evidence shows that when given the opportunity the majority of individuals are driven to improve the quality of their lives; and also, that quality is measured in relative and not absolute terms.
I guess I'm a pessimist then.
Authors? Its the publishers who get paid. The authors just write the words.
Do you have thoughts on persuading people to spend years of their lives writing books for zero compensation?
Many have done so, and will continue to do. No one has to be persuaded if they have thoughts on their mind. Compensation is the side-effect.
[0]: https://monoskop.org
[1]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/
[2]: https://computerhistory.org/collections/
[3]: https://oapen.org/
So, that creates a world (not too dissimilar to our own, but notably so) where only the independently wealthy can ever afford to produce art full time. Can you see any downsides to that world?
I'd be more on board with this take if it were artists engaging in these lawsuits. Elsevier doesn't elicit the same sympathy, though.
'Stealing' from a company with 2B in profit (much from publicly funded research), LibGen is looking a lot like Robin Hood to Elsevier's Prince John.
It's the same issue. If writers could meaningfully get an audience who buys their work independently, they wouldn't need a publisher.
Publishers offer support and printing, but ultimately an author needs a publisher to spread reach (i won't say "make money", because authors sure won't make much). Becsuse it's all about being loud and publishers have resources to be loud. Much better odds compared to a grassroots community paying a fair price when the author is ready to release.
The problem is that publishers, being the middleman, take over authors the same way the supermarket network takes over the food producers. Publishers own the shelf and a price label, and being less numerous and more organized, they can effectively own the audience's attention. They can help, they can also shut author down. They're not ultimately interested in maximizing availability, because they profit directly from the gap. That's why they need restrictions and ways around them.
Maybe a billion-dollar company has more money to spend on lawsuits than artists do? Doesn't make them the good guys, but I'm not surprised that it's them doing it.
The greatest and most lasting art in human history was created by artists who were sponsored by the wealthy as their only source of income.
This is survivorship bias: art owned and protected by wealthy sponsors has a much higher chance of making it through the years. Most art is folk art, and has been lost to the centuries.
The did say "longest lasting art". It feels more survivor bias to mention the Picasso's of history over the many more wealthy who spent their time in the craft.
It's not fair, but it makes sense. And sure the most well known art is not the best art. But a place like this should know the best tech is rarely the most popular product.
So you don't think there's a downside to the wealthy having a defacto monopoly on what art gets created?
I dislike copyright as much as the next guy, but the people who want to write and share free books can (and do) do that now as well.
Being paid and knowing they can spend their livelihood writing while paying rent is about the best persuasion you can have. Aside from the wealthy who don't need to worry about that.
Yes: we can pay authors nothing. It works. In fact we can make them grovel to get something published, and even get them to pay for the privilege of being considered for the publishing we're offering zero compensation for.
We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.
The people who are using libgen, are probably also not the people who would pay an author for a book anyway.
Not saying I agree or disagree one way or another, but that's really probably the reality.
I've bought multiple physics textbooks which I've first downloaded from libgen. I'm not going to spend 50-100€ of my money on a book before skimming through the contents first. Also some textbooks on niche topics can cost more than 200€ or cannot be found at all.
The alternative would be to make a request for my university library to get the book, but I don't know how long that would take if it would happen at all.
Would the world be a better place if I stuck to studying only the books in local libraries and what I can personally afford? I personally don't think so.
Sounds like a good opportunity to start lobbying to raise library funding, maybe even overhaul it into the 21st century so we can reasonably have a government funded "Netflix of books" of sorts.
Also long term, but it'd kill like, 5 birds with one stone.
> The people who are using libgen, are probably also not the people who would pay an author for a book anyway
Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
The only med books I bought were atlases (histology, anatomy, etc) Everything else I borrowed, photocopied or bought second hand. Many of my classmates did the same. In our group, very few rich students ever photocopied or bought second hand
If books weren't sold for profit, we would have better books, only released less often. Back then, we didn't have so many yearly releases, and I honestly think that isn't needed.
Why would we have better books you say? Similar to how open source projects draw very good programmers. Some do it for prestige, and some weird ones do it for the joy o f doing true quality work. IMHO
> Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
you take a few interesting leaps in a failed attempt of.... trying to turn opinion into fact?
> the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate.
Uhhh, wot??
Please provide ANY source for this. Really. Like even if it's a blog you wrote and was a creative writing experiment for you, publish it. Just so I can mock you.
> (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
So at this point, I hope it's clear that you are a bit silly. But...
> For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience
This level of intellectual dishonest is horrible, especially if it's legitimate.
How do you expect do have any kind of conversation with this behavior? Flagging is the only thing that you'll get.
>The people who are using libgen, are probably not the people who would pay an author for a book
Isn't that supposed to be the publisher's job? They don't. Just ask the authors.
> Do you have thoughts on persuading people to spend years of their lives writing books for zero compensation?
Most books make very very little income for the author. So it is already the case.
I don't think we should make it even worse for them. They are at least going to make some money for their long months or years of work with a chance to make it big.
This is like saying that no great software would exist if people didn't get paid for developing software.
Do you think books which are written by people who had to be persuaded to write them are worth reading?
I think the chance of financial success can incentivize the author to make a better work. Let the authors who are willing to write for free release their work for free.
Yes, the second order effects of money incentive. Internet and movies also suffer from enshittification.
Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers. Or that most book authors get ridiculous royalties in their publishing contract (a few percent of the price, including for ebooks that are being sold at the price of paper copies) unless they are already famous.
> Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers.
Yes, but most researchers are compensated by either the state, universities or companies hoping to profit of their research. Little high-level research is done for the fun of it.
Given how low the pay can be when not working on hot topics, one could argue that most research is in fact done for the fun of it.
They should find a patron or grant making institution that values the production of knowledge, not publishers who seek property to license out.
I buy most of my books second hand. The author doesn't get anything from that either. Should it be illegal?
The secondhand market helps the firsthand market: people are more likely to buy something at the offered price if they know they can resell it on the secondhand market later.
Can you imagine what the automobile market would look like if you couldn't trade-in or sell your car and just had to trash it? New cars sales would plummet.
I think a used market exchange where someone had to buy each product is a different scale from one buyer who uploads infinite copies to the internet.
It's a tragedy of the commons. Not a commons of the product tho, of the ability to keep the creations flowing.
Lots of people already do, in essence.
I think a UBI could be a good start.
I'm willing to receive that. How much will you be giving me?
Iirc the current rate is 120 CRC per month. Sign up here: https://circles.garden/welcome/onboarding
The real question is: are you willing to build a community around accepting it? Otherwise it's just numbers.
Books are ideally free for all as is. That's the goal of a library. But we know how that's going...
I agree with the sentiment.
Also, interesting username.
>Books should be free for all
yes certainly, thank your local library.. your country has them?
> we should encourage and educate people
yes certainly, but many people have had income from a book economy. Some certain books of great quality might increase in price. How can people wish for no-book economy so quickly?
What it means for libgen to exist in the broader sense is that we are used to pilfering what we value but cannot afford.
In a better world, the government would run something like libgen. That shit’s a public good.
Have you been to your local library?
Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.
LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.
I wonder if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Meta.ai have spent much time looking at LibGen…
My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.
There is a digital equivalent. Your local library allows you to borrow e-books or e-audio-books. (Probably.)
The apps are a bit janky, but they're there.
The notion of 'borrowing' an e-book, which has no intrinsic limit to number of times it can be checked out or when it must be returned, is a joke.
My library service has an e-book loan system. When I go to get an item - if they have it - it is often "unavailable to borrow". Ridiculous.
Those are missing many books because they only work at the whim of the publishers. Also they cost extra money to run which further limits them.
The apps are beyond janky compared to free PDFs and epubs delivered in seconds from libgen with no login.
Long live libgen - one of my favourite places on the ‘net.
Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.
As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.
I am pretty sure they do, this data is just too valuable. At least meta admitted using a dataset called "books3" which contains ~200k pirated ebooks for llama 1 and 2 [1]. Anna's archive provides datasets for LLM training, but who knows who they are working with..
I also wonder if google is using their own dataset from books.google.com .
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/meta-admits-use-of-pirated-book-dat...
> Have you been to your local library?
Yes
> Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.
It's much worse both in the content availability and ease of use, so not a bit different
Have you lived in a developing country?
I think this should apply to most essential services (and libgen absolutely is an essential service; others are E2EE messaging and E2EE cloud-hosting). After all, people like to imagine (and are often told) that taxes are not a ransom you pay to the ruling oligarchy, but almost a donation you almost willingly give away for the sake of maintaining public infrastructure.
But the key words are "a better world". I don't think this is really possible in, uh, this world. Imagining a world like that is a bit like a soviet utopian-fantasy book about the world of established communism. "Sounds Good, Doesn't Work".
To be fair, though, if "the government" you are talking about is the one of the USA, I thinks loc.gov is pretty great stuff. I mean, it's pretty shit compared to what somebody like "the Anna" could do with this amount of resources, and it isn't really made in a way to make researching, copying and saving stuff locally easy, but still, I'd love if every country maintained something like that (at least). Lots of relatively rare interesting stuff out there.
I don’t really agree it’s unachievable, just a matter of political will imo. All that would have to happen is enough public interest to outweigh publisher lobbying.
So, how does it operate on a technical level?
Anna's Archive has a complete repository on how they have it setup.
https://software.annas-archive.se/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Boy I hope the court is completely impotent to actually enforce anything in this case.
Why are we not slipping onion support into Hyphanet's opennet and just uploading library genesis to that?
This is so messed up.
51.5 TB non fiction pdfs has only 2TB of txt.
That's because most of them are basically images. I wish they could be gone through and converted to a better format but that's one hell of an undertaking.
Do you have a magnet for it?
there is a git repo that claims to do it. They might have it for you.
> The lawsuit was stalled for months because LibGen’s anonymous operators didn’t respond. With no other viable options left, the publishers filed a motion for a default judgment in their favor.
Narrator: and LibGen’s anonymous operators still didn’t respond
The domain name injunction is interesting, but they want IPFS gateways to comply too, thats odd
but a direct IPFS hash would work, are there any browser extensions that resolve ipfs:// URIs?
I was going to say Brave but while digging up supporting evidence[1] it turns out they nuked it in August of this year, citing lack of use :sob:
1: https://brave.com/blog/ipfs-support/
IPFS Companion
The reason why LibGen no longer loads at all since yesterday, suddenly solved.
still loads as of right now
You have it loading? I've repeatedly tried libgen.rs and it claims a typo, despite this being its link.
Damn, I'd better grab stuff now then! :D
"While this is a win on paper, it’s unlikely that the publishers will get paid by the LibGen operators, who remain anonymous."
Libgen put up even more mirrors next time. Publishers: [surpised pikachu face]
it's a real problem that will not be solved by trying to apply current laws
digital assets which don't suck under capitalism require real innovation from the government or, if that doesn't work, the people themselves
So making libgen is illegal, but using it to train LLMs is legal? I know there's a whole issue of transitive liability (maybe you couldn't know you were getting an illegal thing from the thief, so it doesn't always make sense for you to to be liable too), but this kind of thing seems to power way too much of my industry for me to be comfortable.
There's the concept of inducing copyright infringement (a la MGM v. Grokster), so much depends on whether those who train LLMs were inducing libgen's operations in some way, for example if payment or resources were being contributed to libgen.
Welcome to the future! Companies will make illegal or very expensive to access original information, like scientific papers. However, guess what, your friendly AI LLM, trained by your friendly tech monopoly on stollen data, will allow you to access all this research that was paid with your taxes, through monthly payments. But don't ask the AI where it got this information from, because it can get really upset with you...
It's actually amusingly easy to have ChatGPT criticize some OpenAI practice or another. Tell it to do a search for some controversial story, then to "analyze it from an ethical standpoint".
if you ask it to explain how it arrived at this reasoning, they'll ban you.
Seriously, who is running around here on HN downvoting such comments?
There is old group photo floating around with Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz.
One ended up in jail commiting suicide for scraping freely licensed JSTOR articles.
The other is considered hero for scraping JSTOR articles and every other article ever.
Lesson is dont waste peoples time with things that dont make money. More money it makes the safer you are.
RIP Aaron Swartz.
I live in the wrong timeline :(
Rule of Capitalism #1: If it is found to be good, but one can't make money off it, it must be made illegal to produce run, then replaced with something that sucks horribly, but can potentially be profitted off of.
The people training LLMs have billions of dollars and the people using it to read that can't afford a $300 journal do not.
So training is legal and reading is illegal.
So, the solution to legal problems is… money? Lots of money?
Always has been.
Meh, I’d say power, the power is just being conveyed through money in this scenario
Money and political/legal power are freely and effortlessly convertible both ways.
access to money. don't even need to use it.
beautifully put, thank you! it's the golden rule - those with the gold make up the rules.
Gold or money is a just proxy for power.
Power is the final crux here.
They are cross fungible and leverage able, so this is a silly empty distinction.
But money has historically been more effective at producing or controlling power than the other way around.
I'm not sure I can agree with that, because historically speaking would include the time we had nobility. And in that time period, having money would not provide you with power, as nobles were beyond the law and could simply cease it for themselves.
They are not cross fungible.
Money/gold is a proxy in the current social system.
that's right, the neanderthals didn't use gold, they hit each other with clubs.
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LibGen is the most important achievement of humanity. It is much more important to keep it going than the most of sovereign countries.
A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations, ought to create and maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.
> maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.
Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection of printed literature on STEM topics, the books have published not for the sake of earning money, also they used to have free libraries among all the villages. This is the closest example I can give and BTW those Russian books are freely published on Russian torrent trackers.
> A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations
Even without any further clarification the search among existing countries is going to return 0 results.
> Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection
Meanwhile they still have flibusta.is where almost any book ever published in Russian can be downloaded one-click as structured XML (FB2) and the maintainer is dying of brain cancer right now after having paid for the server to run for some more weeks. Russian is among the top languages in terms of the amount of books published in it. Apparently we are witnessing two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time.
Hurry up with downloading these from the website because the Flibusta author has reported on having glioblastoma few days ago, and there is no new leader for the project. The servers are going to be shut down and the good name is going to be spotless because of not reused. Probably this is why you told about "two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time". BTW all 450Gb of Flibusta can be downloaded via torrents but I don't know how to download all of Libgen.
> I don't know how to download all of Libgen.
See https://wiki.mhut.org/distribution:torrents
I just hope enough capable people will download everything to be able to create mirrors again someday. Perhaps the darknet can turn out a better place.
Also free psychiatric hospitals where dissidents would be confined with "sluggish schizophrenia" and dosed heavily with psychoactive drugs.
Psy* (psychology, psychiatry etc) is neither a science nor a medicine. If your only issue with Soviet regiment is intential usage of psy* pseudoscience then try to search about the Rosenhan experiment.
There is neuroscience though which is a science and can prove things like depression and schizophrenia exist (many distinct kinds of both, possible to distinguish using MRI). Sadly there aren't many neuroscientists and MRI machines available to general public so we still have to rely on psychiatrists for help when our neural system goes awry. In many cases they actually help.
How would this differ from a system of public libraries, which most advanced countries have?
Because it offers the content to everyone anywhere for free without authentication or a limit on the number of concurrent copies available.
Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know, but it is certainly a different point on the continuum than traditional libraries.
> Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know
The actual current status-quo is. Despite the most of the worthy books being available on pirate websites, people still buy books. Publishers still are not bankrupt. Even independent individuals post "I wrote a book" here every now and then, link to DRM-free purchase pages and seem happy.
I personally spent many hundreds dollars buying DRM-free ebooks on GumRoad and HumbleBundle (despite most of them being on LibGen!). I also bought numerous hardcover paper books after reading their pirated ebook versions.
But how should people be incentivized to create new stuff if the old one isn't being hidden away from the public's eyes. /s
Armchair anarchists aside, it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Money is rarely an incentive for writing a textbook, but it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
>it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators and translators poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Given that, I don't feel too much guilt 'borrowing' from alternate sources.
> I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Publishers give you no lending rights on physical books; legislation and common law give you rights to lend that stem from the first-sale doctrine where I live. Push your legislators (or courts) to establish first-sale doctrine over digital content and there you go.
Our legislators don't seem very interested in consumer rights and protections anymore, so I'm not terribly interested in their copyright laws.
> it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.
Why? You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
> it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
There are better ways of supporting work you find important than the parasitic publishing industry and copyright.
> maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
Who do you think was feeding the monks?
I don't really care, but many different people, for many different reasons.
You may think this specific example, which you seem to think resembles the current publishing industry, negates my overall point, but... not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_books#Book_culture
> The authors of antiquity had no rights concerning their published works; there were neither authors' nor publishing rights. Anyone could have a text recopied, and even alter its contents. Scribes earned money and authors earned mostly glory unless a patron provided cash; a book made its author famous. This followed the traditional concept of the culture: an author stuck to several models, which he imitated and attempted to improve. The status of the author was not regarded as absolutely personal.
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
We are living in the most productive time ever for the book industry, I think comparing the current industry to the past when we produce several orders of magnitude more works that many people highly value is nonsensical.
That point was specifically in response to the suggestion that we need publishers and copyright for books to exist - which is obviously false. Not sure how the size of the current industry relates to that point.
I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive. Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
> I'm saying that even though books would exist without copyright and publishers, it allows for several times more books to exist by providing an incentive.
Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
> Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
> Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing. Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
> Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free. They might not have an editor or translator, but those things cost money. But most authors like money and since most books loose publishers money its not like the author is loosing out.
> That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
I'm glad you liked them. The best fiction works I read I paid for, and trust me I've read a lot of free fiction works.
> Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing.
It's not obvious at all when all you mentioned was quantity (two times in a row). And I think the reason that was all you mentioned is because that's the only 'obvious' increased metric you have. Not to mention, there are many other things that are different now, so chalking it all up to copyright and publishers is illogical.
> Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
Again, you're making claims about 'peak' and 'book health', etc. without actually defining what that means... is it supposed to be 'obvious'?
> Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free.
That entirely depends on the situation.
> You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then? I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing, and it doesn't seem like it's doing so great:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
I'm not saying the publishing industry is sane or just, but how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
> Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then?
I personally won't, because I've never used it. I am 100% against it being shut down though.
> I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
Read my comment again and find the spot where I said 'nothing'.
> I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing
You can start by defining what 'health of books' even means, but your conclusion here seems seriously perverse.
> how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
What is belittling about acknowledging the fact that current works (especially technical/non-fiction) heavily draw from previous works? The last few technical books I read literally had zero original/unique information - they were just re-organization/re-phrasing/compilation of other works. That's not a bad thing - I think it's great, and the books are great, but is that justification for restricting access to this information - when it is literally 100% based on other works?
If there was a way I could give the authors a few dollars for their work, I totally would. Instead in the system we have, I have to give a publisher $100 so they can give the author $0.50. The publisher uses the money to make rich people richer, and scaring people by suing for violating laws that they themselves wrote.
Whenever possible, I try to but stuff from the authors & creators directly. I haven't been in the market for textbooks in a long time, but even 20 years ago it was a ripoff, and it seems to have only gotten worse.
I'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.
Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.
The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.
I certainly appreciate your efforts, and the efforts of everyone involved. I know a few authors and copy editors, and it seems like an incredible amount of work to deliver the finished product.
I suppose my snark was more in reference to the textbook market, which seems to be the primary focus of Libgen. Academic textbooks seem primarily to be a way to extract some student loan money into publishers' pockets, with plenty of obvious typos, problems that can't be completed, and new editions every year that simply change the order of chapters without fixing any of those issues.
When I was a student, in several of my technical classes, after every test we'd spend a class correcting the answers provided by the textbook that disagreed with more authoritative sources. Spending $100 for a book that was only half right when I could have bought a real technical book for $40 has made me cynical about the whole industry.
I've written numerous technical articles and had to publish them in particular journals for academic promotion/retention reasons, and almost universally the (paid) editors (not the working for free other academic reviewers) added negative value: they introduced errors and I had to spend hours of unnecessary time trying to catch these newly introduced errors, and even then tonnes remained. I distribute the preprints (that paid editors didn't get their hands on) because they're much less error- and typo-ridden then the official published versions.
Anyway, I've got a new list of publishers I'll never publish with, nor use anything they publish as required reading for a class I teach.
Ebook pricing is broken. Sell it for $0.99 and you'll get buyers. You can't sell ebooks when it costs only 5-10% less than a dead-tree hardcover variant. People don't like being ripped off.
Books are far cheaper to print than most people realize. If you see a publisher charging 5-10% less for an ebook than a physical book, it's because they're pricing the ebook at whatever the physical book's price is, minus the printing costs.
Before ebooks came abundant the publishers said some 10% of book price is their money, another 10-15% is for author and editors, and the rest is eaten up by print and distribution+shop. I guess the distribution through publishers' site can be done at 20% of sales price.
The major costs you're missing are marketing and "plate" (up front cost to produce the content). Those make up most of the total costs. For textbooks, the decision makers are professors (so door-to-door sales to get their attention), and the market is pretty small, especially for upper level content (so few units to amortize fixed costs over). Print, paper, and binding are cheap, say ~$10-12 average for a textbook. Typically, distribution channel takes a 20-25%, depending on channel partner, and many colleges mandate that sales go through the school bookstore because they get a cut, so publisher's website isn't necessarily a viable option (without a lot of student marketing). Author royalties run ~13-15% of revenue, and editors hit plate expense (they're publisher employees, so not a variable cost like authors). Textbook publisher Ebitda margins wind up running 20-25%, but most publisher's pay a lot of interest expense, partly because the major costs are up front, and partly because there's been a lot of PE ownership. Net margins can be tight as anyone else's.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
There's a fairly small pool of readers for a niche technical book. Selling it for $0.99 won't meaningfully increase the number of buyers, and it won't recover enough revenue to meet the cost of production.
That's why you see pulp paperbacks selling for $20+ so that the e-book looks like a steal at $15.
I've seen ebooks being sold for more money than the printed version.
Sell them at reasonable prices and people will buy them. Ever seen someone photocopying an entire newspaper? Guess what would happen if newspapers prices suddenly were inflated to like 50 bucks.
Blame your publisher.
The reality is that without the existence of publishers the price of almost all texts would drift toward a minimum far below the worthwhileness of any author.
So maybe, like art, texts will become sheer passion projects - even technical texts. Otherwise, I'm sure LLMs will be able to replace their usefulness soon.
The fact that artists/writers pearl clutch over their already non lucrative jobs while software folks are gleeful to sell their own earning potential out from under themselves shows you that artists/writers are wannabe Bolshevik’s and that software folks are the only honest “egalitarians” out there.
lmao. As a painter-turned-software engineer, this rings true.
Is there a legal alternative to illegal projects like Libgen? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
That's the entire concept of a public library.
My library even lets me check out books from Kobo e-reader.
Easily is the operative word. Blockbuster was easy but you had to drive there -- netflix is easier. Libraries similarly require driving (unless you use overdrive / similar) but piracy is easier for many as well. Books just haven't found their spotify/netflix; the kindle store is basically 2009 itunes.
I don't think many realize how much libraries have via internet ("overdrive / similar") these days. You don't even have to show up in person to sign up at my local library.
Libgen and the like tend to just have more on hand though, and that's the big differentiator in usability IMO. There are things your local library just isn't going to have a copy of but libgen will. After that happens once, why bother with the library again? Outside of "it's legal" or "I find more moral" type concepts there tends not to be a strong reason.
> Is there a legal alternative? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Plenty of books (and other written works, such as serial publications) are in the public domain, hence fully legal from a copyright POV. However discovery is still a major problem: many works in the public domain are still far from being easily findable or accessible online. (Even then, it's worth keeping in mind that the books people generally think of as the 'Greatest Books of the Western Canon' are, by and large, in the public domain, and that already is more books than you could feasibly read in a lifetime.)
Many but not remotely enough books are in the public domain. Copyright terms are now ridiculously long—the last Sherlock Holmes stories only just entered public domain.
It would be very hard to profit from that? Because at most people would read few books a month. How much would they pay for it? Competition is literally libraries for free. Music or Movies dont't have free competitors. There would be long term tech cost, 100s of employees and all. The math is very hard even for long term.
The Internet Archive's 'Lending Library' does this, but suffered a major blow in the recent copyright case. It's really a big advance in human knowledge, and works as simply as you say (you need to use their online viewer or an Adobe DRM client).
libby? hoopla?
also kindle unlimited
That are not for technical books, and Amazon used to be famous for deleting a book from used's devices. It is not exactly fare to compale an honest source of technical books which allows anyone to download some rare tech books with a source of DRM which requires me to deal with something not exactly reading. Just look at those websites - who is that visitor of libgen website who needs those animations?
GP asked a Netflix for books. Not fare to compare but it's what was asked.
yeah obviously libgen is way better, it’s what i use. but i was just answering the question
> like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.
Libgen is not Netflix for books, it is thepiratebay for books. Libgen is not helpful in discovering more books because if to judge about those literature which is abundant on Libgen, the technical one, what allows user to discover some books on Libgen is only another books or your interest to specific scientist or field.
(I know there are a lot of fiction materials on Libgen such as comicses but all I use to read is science books or at least some non-fiction, so my opinion may be biased).
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Now, can someone help explain to me how I can ask LibGen (or Google, or my ISP) to refund me the thousands of dollars I’ve lost in royalties on the 7 books of mine they have up there?
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Rex+van+der+spuy&lg_topic=l...
Google gave me link, searching my name turned them up.