Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.
Hopefully this will encourage more people to go back to the original libgen. I suspect Z-library's popularity was because of a better interface and larger collection, but I think lots of people didn't realize libgen offers all its books/papers for free without limits.
Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I'm Anna, the one who made the backup).
We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at http://pilimi.org (we'll set up a patreon-like system soon)
I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it.
Something that,
- is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion)
- requires no power
- doesn't require software to read/reboot from
- (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years
Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve these goals by miniaturizing pages and etching them on some metallic surface (a titanium alloy), depositing a layer of some resilient transparent material onto this surface, and creating multiple copies.
A few copies for Earth. 2 or 3 for the Moon. And a few sent out of the solar system on probes like Voyager.
Voyager itself is a great example of what we could achieve. The golden records were made out of stable, inert materials and Voyager’s trajectory doesn’t intersect with any known object for billions of years. The records themselves will be intact for at least two billion years according to one estimate. They are, for all intents and purposes, functionally immortal parcels of information.
Some simple math, if the pages could fit inside of a 10mm x 10mm square, then for a plate that's about the size of an average coffee table at 2' x 4', we could fit 7,432 pages.
Assuming that we have 50 billion pages, we'd need about 6.7 million such plates to fit all of human knowledge, so far.
It sounds crazy, but assuming we could get net costs per plate down to $500, each copy would be about $35M. Or, ~0.14% of an Uber. Alternatively, 0.002% of the F-35 program.
That's doable!
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6.7 million plates will probably weigh a lot. So off-world copies might need to use an alternative encoding scheme.
Another problem is likely to be organization of the plates/copies. The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.
(apologies for any typos, it's very late at my end)
I think what you consider the hardest part, putting it together so that someone who does not speak any human language today deciphers it, is actually one of the least of your problems. Unless you deliberately encrypt the information (which you wouldn’t), I have a feeling that even Wikipedia alone might be sufficient for a motivated civilization to figure it out. Linguists and archeologists in our time have to do with far, far less, and they have reasonable success. Add in a few things like dictionaries, textbook, novels, and I have little doubt that it’s a big obstacle.
Rather I think you vastly underestimate what a billion years can do. The earth itself, and all that was on it, was formed a “few” billion years ago.
Our rivers alone have carved entire valleys into mountain ranges in much, much less time. I doubt a titanium alloy and some unspecified sort of super epoxy stand a chance.
And constant custody with regular restoration cannot be guaranteed for billions of years either.
That’s a massive problem for one plate (and its many copies) alone, more so for millions of unique plates…
The Long Now Foundation is only shooting for 10000 years, as far as I know.
Off world would help, no atmosphere on the moon for instance makes for less deterioration, and a cave system would shield it from radiation.
On earth clay tablets have done a great job : we have tablets 6000 years old, so we know that works. That’s 60% of 10k already. Titanium seems expensive and might be melted down in time of need, like bronze has been often in the past. Clay tablets survived partly because it’s a ‘worthless’ material.
When there's a lot of things to start with, there's bound to be a lot of things to survive by chance even without preserving. A lot of the stuff that survived was accidentally preserved by nature.
You could say that, but I would point out to its resilience and suitability as a medium for long term information containment. Literally thousands upon thousands have been found. Imagine if one were to try make it last longer :)
A multi-billion year backup is probably pointless.
The earth will be uninhabitable in that time frame due to changes in the atmosphere and beyond that the sun itself will complete it's lifecycle.
I know there's a big fad to "just believe" in a SF future that spans space and time but physical realities in this area are pretty rough.
I think the best thing people could do is realise that, eventually, everything ends and believing otherwise when it comes to the human race is much like believing in an afterlife.
Our survival is not the point. It is an act of hope and the manifestation of our goodwill to the rest of the universe. There is nothing more valuable that we can offer to the Universe than our culture, history, knowledge, and the Earth's biological data.
Imagine if you were an alien species who somehow comes across this capsule hundreds of millions or billions of years from now. It's proof of sentient life elsewhere! But then you date the U-238 and realize that they're probably all dead...
But, they've left all of their civilization, culture, heritage, and knowledge behind. And you get to experience that, even recreate a tiny simulacrum of their world. And it gives you something, it's a tangible form of communication and cooperation across aeons.
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In the short term, the backup is probably useful to have. Imagine if a collection is lost to fire or some other catastrophe, and one of the closer ones could be used to bring it back. Case in point, the fire at Notre-Dame. In 2015, Dr. Andrew Tallon, an art historian, painstakingly scanned all of Notre Dame, https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/04/16/we-have-b...
I think it's important to be honest. Would you have flagged his work as pointless in 2015? After all, the Cathedral has stood for centuries, been photographed so many times, what's the point of a 3D scan?
After 2019's fire, those scans became important (unsure to what degree) to the restoration effort. At some level, by capturing and preserving history, Andrew Tallon helped save history. And now it becomes a part of the story.
That's the goal. To engage in an act of optimism for the betterment of us and all of humanity.
Doomer fatalism is nearly as dumb as sci-fi optimism. It's 100% physically plausible, using technology we have today, to make humanity star-faring. The costs would be exorbitant at this point, but within the reach of human productive capacity (assuming we're willing to ditch the partial nuclear test ban).
Getting to the moon only takes another JFK. We have the tech, we have the people, all we lack is the budget and a 5-10 year deadline. Also, another hard part is getting there safely enough. A 5% chance of dying out there is probably not acceptable nowadays. We probably need to go below 0.1% to attempt it again, and that's not trivial, especially with the possibility of solar flares beyond the magnetic protection of the Earth.
The real question is, is it worth making it a priority?
> 6.7 million plates will probably weigh a lot. So off-world copies might need to use an alternative encoding scheme.
For the Moon and Mars, carve them into stone there. You'll have to defend against meteor strikes so they'll be carved and stored deep underground. No idea about seismic activity on those bodies.
For outer space, maybe it's pointless because finding, boarding, unloading an interstellar probe and sending the cargo back home is not easy unless you have very advanced interstellar ships. An orbit around the sun could be an easier place to spot. The Library of Ceres or the Library of the Troians?
But of course you need some marker then on the ground so people know where to look for it later if they want to read the data. Maybe some artwork? A giant monolith perhaps?
I'd start with the pyramid, but there's a risk of trying to dig up a regular mountain, which would be very wasteful. Maybe we should dig instead the Face of Mars after all, but who knows what other alien faces are there that we can't recognize? Let's dig everywhere!
Oops! I did a rough calc in my head but forgot to add in the two zeros. But it's still fairly "cheap." 0.14 Ubers (14%), or 0.002 Pentagon Monetary Black Holes (0.2% of the F-35 program)
In the next few hundred years it's pretty likely that gold price will be marginal, as asteroid miners looking for less useless materials such as nickel, cobalt and platinum mine an excess.
So no, unless for some hidden reason asteroid mining doesn't work out, which is pretty unlikely given how badly the developed world needs that material.
> The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.
Though other crystals should be highly stable. Quartz seems geologically and chemically stable, plain old glass ain't bad. Something reasonably cheap is probably preferable, both from the cost basis (an expensive-to-create archive is a challenge) and the repurposing challenge (a diamond-etched bibliographic archive might have other appeals to those who chance across it).
Even parchment proved sufficiently valuable that works were often repurposed (and lost) through palimpsests.
https://archmission.org is doing something like this. It's a super cool project, and they work with the Long Now Foundation, the Internet Archive, etc.
5d is a bit dramatic but it is a femtosecond laser writing of quartz crystal that should, in theory, be stable for billions of years and can hold hundreds of terabytes.
This size will have microscopic features! There is probably a balance between ease of scanning/technological sophistication required to see the pages, cost of etching, and the number of plates overall.
The Long Now Foundation has extensively studied the language loss problem and arrived at a fairly elegant set of solutions.
You'd want to select it special to be non-reactive, and even then limit or eliminate exposure to UV, oxygen, and temperature changes. Stone is also a changing material on this time scale and I think storage preference would largely be the same. I think one of the more salient differences is feature size; easier to make very small yet still legible images in metal than in stone.
If you're asking why Zlibrary didn't, it's because they got greedy and wanted to soak up donations that might go to Libgen by piggybacking off of their servers and having individual uploads for their own.
I will make no claims about my identity one way or another. If you are worried for me, don't be. If you are worried for yourself, then please take actions in line with your risk tolerance.
> Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.
What is the difference between what "z-library" was doing, which was "you download a lot for free, but if you need more, just pay us, because no internet bandwith is for free" from donations? I always understood the subscription at z-library as support, not different than patreon...
Forgive me, but I'm unclear on how I access the collection. I can just go to the torrent files as listed here: http://pilimi.org/zlib-downloads.html ? Is there a mirror where I can search for a particular book?
TLS doesn't matter / isn't needed here right?
The IP address is still in the header from what I understand. So the only thing https can hide is the content, such as a credit card or password that you enter into the site.
The fact that it's a plaintext website that doesn't change means that the exact same information is encoded in simply giving the IP address as there is in knowing that someone looked around the site - because there's nothing else to do?
I would like to learn more about how I am wrong, if I am wrong.
> So the only thing https can hide is the content, such as a credit card or password that you enter into the site.
TLS is not only for hiding the content, it's also for authentication: it ensures that no malicious middle party can modify the content, for instance to inject malicious Javascript (for an example of this happening, read about the "Great Cannon" attack on GitHub).
It also hides what URLs you visited. Depending how the hosting is implemented, just being able to see the IP, or even the domain name, wouldn't show what you were doing, but if it's in plaintext, they can see exactly what pages were visited and files downloaded
Their policy was basically around discouraging datahoarders and scrapers as far as I could tell. If I recall correctly, the limit was something like 10 e-books per day per ip address. Not really a huge limit when you consider that there was no limit on file size for things like graphic novels. They never required accounts, and the only thing locked behind a required donation was compute intense tasks like conversion, and send-to-kindle.
The kind of bandwidth/storage that they had to be consuming is quite expensive and I don't blame the organizers for soliciting donations.
You're right. I don't know why there's people repeating that "they have commercial intent" when it's actually not true. That's unfair, ZLib is a really good web
They used various dark pattern marketing techniques to try and convince people to pay and make the site look like a legit library, so clearly some commercial intent even if it was always possible to download for free (maybe to provide some deniability?).
The only thing approaching a dark pattern is asking you to sign in for advanced features. A free account gets you a bunch of those features.
The main page has a single 'donate' link in the upper right corner. A contribution as low $1usd was enough to unlock all features except higher daily download limits.
- Making the service look like a legit library instead of clearly saying it's a repository of stolen books. Was confused myself for a while when I first stumbled on it, had to infer from it being too good to be true and doing some due diligence search.
- Various tricks to get the user to give an email (even if not necessary, similar to cookie boxes making "accept everything" very much easier than "only essentials".)
- After some time (download count or delay?) spam emails to try and get some payments out of the punter, again under false pretence.
Not saying it was bad value for money. Possibly not much worse than tricks average legal businesses employ. The point is someone sat down and devised that part of the UX with no other purpose than extract more money from users, by lying to them.
It never occurred to me that people wouldn’t realize that it was a piracy site, and not a “library”. I guess I’m just too tuned into the internet. Haha
I see your point now. It’s sort of disappointing that I'm so used to even worse dark patterns on legit sites that I don’t really see this as dark.
> Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.
Ick.
I'm sympathetic to piracy, but the moment people start to make money off of pirated works it starts to feel much more wrong.
The download limit was per day per ip address, and they would remove limits for active community members. I have a hard time believing they were doing anything more than paying for hosting bills.
>Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription)<
That's a lie mixed with some truth. They have a download limit yes, but one that resets every 24 hours. You can download free 5 books even without an account, and with an account 10 and even more if you used the telegram bot.
Like other user mentioned, that policy probaly was to discourage datahoarders and scrapers. And if you donated to the project you recieved the benefit of being able to download more books per day.
> [...] but the moment people start to make money off of pirated works it starts to feel much more wrong.
"Piracy" is expensive! Most people do not donate to support these things it's understandable if they decide to charge a few cents or bucks to keep the light on.
I only pirate things that I've already purchased. I generally purchase used things, so the artists don't see my dollars either way in that case. Furthermore, artists only see a small fraction of the dollars of any purchase you make. It'd be nice if all media was available inexpensively and without DRM for all to consume as they pleased, and if anything over the hosting costs went straight to the authors rather than through a byzantine old publishing apparatus. But we don't live in that world, so I do what I do.
Artists - just like inventors etc - should be compensated for their work, but in my humble opinion not in what has become now essentially perpetuity.
So, an artist eeking out a living on something they worked hard on and released a month ago or two years ago gets sympathy from me. An artist who released a thing 20 years ago and still wants to eek out a living off that, such an artist doesn't really have my sympathy. The great-grandchildren who want to get paid for something an ancestor released 120 years ago[0]? Hell no, go do something yourself to make money.
If you're Lars Ulrich in 2000 and sue Napster over songs you released 10-20 years ago, while sitting on a net worth of maybe around 100-200M USD (now 350M), then my sympathy is with the pirates.
This doesn't touch the issue of how a lot of artists are not making much money, not because of pirates but because of predatory music labels and publishing houses.
It also ignores the problems with the "lost sales" theory. A lot of the pirates would have never paid for stuff they downloaded in the first place. And a lot of pirates started paying after pirating some stuff. E.g. I remember discovering a lot of artists from songs I illegally copied on LAN parties back in the day[1], usually artists too small to be on a lot of rotation on radio and MTV (yes, MTV used to have music, crazy) which I probably would have never known about otherwise. And I gave lots of money to these artists, buying their CDs, going to their concerts when possible, and so on. In the same vein, I discovered artists on whatcd and similar pirate places later on.
And doesn't touch on the "please take my money" issue... There are a lot of things that are out of print, etc, that you cannot pay for. E.g. large companies holding licenses to content may even take works out of print deliberately in tax avoiding schemes - I am not a Hollywood accountant, but from my limited understanding they can declare a loss when doing so which is worth a lot more in tax reduction than keeping a title in print.
And it also doesn't even touch humanity's need to preserve important cultural artifacts for the future.
[0] Remember, up to artists death + 70 years copyright term. While this exact scenario has probably not happened yet, as these rules are too new, you get a glimpse of what will happen in the future when you look about all the legal fighting still happening over Sherlock Holmes - a figure and body of worked created mostly before copyright law even existed.
[1] Yes, I am old. If you have no idea what a LAN party is, it's basically a bunch of people actually meeting in some venue with their computers, wire everything together into a temporary LAN, to play games and swap files, which back in the day really was the only sane way to do mulitplayer and filesharing stuff as internet speeds were so limited, and internet was usually very expensive, often still paying by the minute.
One could argue that the whole purpose of society is to get rid of scarcity.
Creators being unable to earn income is a problem - but artificial scarcity is not a good solution, as it benefits the few at the expense of many. Imagine if everyone was prohibited from sharing news over internet because "free distribution of news harms the journalists who rely on newspaper sales" - that'd be absurd, wouldn't it?
Old-school copyright relied on the natural scarcity of paper and other distribution resources - digital age has lowered the distribution cost to zero, so the old model does not work anymore. Another model of rewarding authors is needed, one that does not rely on restriction of distribution.
> One could argue that the whole purpose of society is to get rid of scarcity.
Scarcity of resources has nothing to do with scarcity of artistic works. Literature isn't fungible like a commodity, and can't be grown or mined as needed. It's also not a professional service or a form of labor. You can't put a gun to a farmer's head and make them write something brilliant, the way you can make them farm potatoes.
One could just as easily argue that society exists to organize labor in a way that increases specialization and efficiency. The reduction of scarcity is just a side effect. Specialization breeds scarcity in every new speciality until it becomes universally reproducible. Art is the forwardmost outcropping of specialization - it exists in advance of what it describes being known or understood - and by definition it is always the most scarce speciality. The artifice in making distribution of it remain difficult is therefore an extension of the natural place of scarce ideas in a world of abundant things.
> One could just as easily argue that society exists to organize labor in a way that increases specialization and efficiency. The reduction of scarcity is just a side effect.
If so, then what is the purpose of specialization and efficiency, if not for the reduction of scarcity, in terms of individual access to resources? If cooperation wasn't beneficial for the individual, nobody would cooperate (unless forced to do so, but I personally wouldn't want to live in such a society).
> The artifice in making distribution of it remain difficult is therefore an extension of the natural place of scarce ideas in a world of abundant things.
The whole idea of monetizing ideas the same way we monetize material things comes from their representation in scarce material things, such as paper. There's nothing "naturally scarce" about ideas - I'd argue the opposite, the ideas can be multiplied and shared at zero cost to the original author of the idea. The only cost comes from the way in which ideas are distributed.
The golden age of music industry happened when the only way to distribute music at scale was to sell records. Producing records was costly, but since there was no other way to listen to music at home, people paid for them. Companies charged more than production cost, and they made profit. Nowdays, music can be distributed at almost zero cost, and every attempt to restrict that is just an attempt by old money to keep the old ways of business, since it was so profitable for them. Spotify and other music streaming services grew as an alternative. I'm not saying they're perfect, or even good - just that there's no reason why alternative models of monetization couldn't be invented.
My whole argument is that treating manifestation of ideas as scarce things is an outdated view - in the digital age, all it takes to share an idea is a few button clicks. Trying to force scarcity will never work unless we devolve into a surveillance dystopia, and we need another way to reward the authors.
You're talking about distribution cost and ignoring the cost in time (and lost opportunity to do something else) to the writers or musicians.
The price of a record was never just the cost of pressing the record. CDs cost pennies to burn; paper and digital printing by the late 20th century were extremely cheap. The wholesale and retail prices always included pay for the artist (along with a raft of agents and corporations along for the ride). Spotify itself imposes artificial costs to distributing music, in the form of limits, prohibiting downloads, subscriptions and advertising. They do this to make money for themselves, but also to pay the artists.
As you say, distribution is now essentially free from a technical standpoint. There's no philosophical difference between Spotify charging 100x what it costs them to stream a song, and a record company charging 20x what it cost to press a CD. Free distribution would mean zero money for artists. We started by talking about piracy. By definition, with piracy the artist gets nothing.
Since no one can sustain an artistic career and produce writing or music over a long period without some sort of income, this means either all artists will have to be from the wealthy classes, have other means of support, and simply want to make art as a hobby, or else there has to be a distribution channel with an imposed toll of some kind that ultimately funnels them payment for their work. Whether subscription-based, or charging per-device for copy protected media, that will never be a perfect system, will never be free of piracy, and will always appear to the end consumer as an arbitrary restriction on free information.
I don't think scarcity of paper has been the limiting factor on price since at least the 18th Century. Since there is no scarcity of electrons, I don't view scarcity as a useful paradigm. The prices of locked downloads are simply representing the actual cost and market value of the work, which should be the same whether on the paper or in the aether.
Distribution costs are the reason why record labels earned so much money - it provided friction to piracy, since copying a vinyl was as expensive (if not more) than buying a new one. That friction is no longer there, and such a model cannot work anymore. Perhaps the age of "rock stars" collecting rent for years is simply over. Why should artists be rewarded indefinitely for just one piece of work? Perhaps the very expectations are inflated due to the previous golden age.
Artists should be rewarded for their work - but artificially limiting everyone's ability to share information is not the right way to do it. It would have severe consequences for the free society.
Another way must be found. I don't have any ideas, but I know that restriction of sharing information is not a good one.
Personally, I use libgen to check if I actually want a given book, and if I do, I buy it (a physical copy, if possible). So, for me, it's a kind of a virtual bookshop.
I do the same, i live in germany and wanted a book from UK, sadly it has 4-5 weeks delivery time but our vacation was a week away. So i downloaded the book, read it on our vacation and had the physical copy a few weeks later deliverd. Later i bought the book a second time when the german version released. With another book i bought for my wife and wanted to read at the same time, i downloaded it and we could both read it and talk about it simultaneously. Some other time i wanted to read a book at home with a physical copy and on my kindle during some time when i was outside in the garden. Cause in a hammock the kindle is easier to hold. Every time i had purchased the physical copy and the illegal download was just for convenience. No harm done.
That's great of you to buy the book as well, major kudos. I would bet most are not as altruistic as you.
Do not traditional libraries and their ebook lending systems, however inconvenient, provide the same service? All one needs to do is be patient until the book you are interested in becomes available. In the meantime, maybe you can check out a different book that is available that you might not have discovered otherwise!
The library would've paid for the copy regardless of whether or not the person actually borrowed the book - the act of borrowing itself makes no difference.
Yep I have done that before to make a 6 bay NAS. Gotta tape over a couple connectors on the sata connector but works great. Datahorders on reddit is a great sub for that sort of stuff. Guides as well as people posting when the deals happen for WD elements (external hdds)
not an argument but just an FYI for people reading about that idea for the first time: some NAS enclosures (QNAP, Synology?) and some power supplies can use the drives directly without disabling that 3.3V pin.
Most enterprise level stuff can (ie, anything that'll go into a rack, the expensive QNAPs/Synos, any supermicro I've encountered, etc.) handle the 3V3 pin issue just fine, in my experience.
It'll depend on where you live and what your goals are. If you have free-time to tinker and enjoy that kind of thing, you can build something very fast and reliable and prevent e-waste by building your own storage server with used parts on the cheap.
If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile.
For example, I bought a used Supermicro CSE-836 [1], which is like a 3U server chassis with 16 hot-swappable drive bays and a backplane of some sort.
The backplanes vary, but mine came with the BPN-SAS2-836EL1. I paid $300 in total for the chassis itself, backplane, dual power supplies, heatsinks, etc, along with a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ [2] and two Xeon E5 2660 V2s as a bundle from someone in the 'ServeTheHome' classifieds section [3]. From there, I picked up a load of HGST 3TB 7200rpm SAS2 drives on eBay for about $10 each from a recycling company. And then 192GB of DDR3 ECC memory from the same place for about $80.
I also grabbed a couple less-than-production-ready 3.84TB U.2 NVMe drives on eBay for a little over $100 each.
I think if I were to do it again, I'd have gotten slightly larger, newer drives. These are all totally fine, but I started seeing ~6TB drives for about 3x the cost per terabyte, which would pay itself off quickly with the energy reduction. The other reason is that I ended up going a little overboard; I have about 56x3TB drives right now, which is a lot more than 16, so I needed to get a couple of JBOD expansions to put them in, each of which were like $250 -- if I had gotten fewer, larger drives, I'd have had another $500 to work with & be saving on energy.
Another thing I'd have done differently is get fewer but larger sticks of memory. I have a really nice amount of RAM right now, but the energy consumption with 24x8GB isn't worth the upfront savings compared to getting 16 or 32GB DIMMs.
All the storage is in OpenZFS on Linux. The 56x3TB drives are configured as 7 RAIDZ2 vdevs, so 2 drives each are for redundancy, and 6 for actual usable storage. This leaves me with a bit over 100TB of usable space. And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.
I am sure I could have done a bunch better, but, so far, everything has been lightning fast and reliable.
I am using ZFSBootMenu [5] as my bootloader. It's cool since it is basically a tiny Linux distro that lives in your EFI and comes with a recent version of ZFS, so you can store your entire OS, including your actual kernel and such in ZFS, and you can enable all sorts of ZFS features that GRUB doesn't support, etc.
This is nice because, since the entire OS is living in ZFS, when I take snapshots, it is always of a bootable, working state, and ZFSBootMenu lets me roll-back to a selected snapshot from within the bootloader.
The Supermicro board has a slot for a SATA DOM [6], which is sort of like the form fact of an SD card. I picked up the smallest, cheapest one I could on eBay for like $15 and use that to store my bootloader. I did this so that my tiny 128GB SSDs that I use for my OS could be given to ZFS directly for simplicity instead of having to carve out a small boot partition, etc.
All in all, I'm probably out about $1750 for >100TB usable, redundant, fast storage, and a decent bit of power for virtualization and whatever else. It costs me like $50ish a month in electricity because of all the drives and DIMMs. But I was already paying 65 euros a month for a 4x8TB server from LeaseWeb to use as a seedbox, and ran out of space, so it's been worth it, even with my dumb decision to use 3TB drives.
Edit: Also, figured it'd be worth mentioning, but the way I got the chassis+motherboard+cpu bundle for such a decent price was by posting my own thread. So, if anyone reading this is broke like me and not finding anything suitable, that is an option.
You won't always find exactly what you're looking for if you just browse around. But I've always had good luck explaining my situation, my budget, my goals, and someone tends to have stuff they don't need.
eBay seems to be pretty useless right now for the chassises (chasses? chassi? I give up) due to memecoin Chia miners. Forums are your best bet if you don't want to pay scalper rates.
I'm one of the two ZFSBootMenu authors - it's great seeing people using it in the wild.
I'm not sure if this is something you're doing already, but don't forget that if you zfs send a snapshot to your storage pool, you can boot from that snapshot in a pinch.
We also (this past week) added a modifier to zbm.prefer - !!. If you specify zbm.prefer=zroot!! on the KCL, it'll only import the zroot pool. This might help your boot times by skipping importing your 56 drive storage pool.
We should have a new release out in the next few weeks, otherwise that feature is in the master branch if you build your own EFI executable.
Oh, interesting, cool! I appreciate the advice -- I am definitely not making use of all of the features.
And thanks for the software! I've been using it on all of my non-Apple devices for a while now. And my mom has been using it on their computer for a fair bit as well. It's been a total lifesaver on a couple of occasions and streamlined a lot.
I really like your writeup and I like how you shared some lessons learned and other stuff that didn't quite work out. Buying hardware can be a real adventure and it's a skill that for some of us is underdeveloped.
I'd encourage you to write more of this technical content!
Thank you, really! Maybe I am just in a weird mood, but that made my day, as strange as it might sound.
I don't think people, in general, are anywhere near as vocal and explicit about the things they appreciate compared to the things they actively hate or that frustrate them. And I think this applies even more so in careers and hobbies like tech where people don't seem to think of the things you make as consumable or creative in the same way they do with others (e.g., movies, videos, music, and other art); my personal experience has been that if someone is reaching out, it's—more often than not—to let you know about an issue or complaint.
So, thanks, it felt nice! And thanks for the reminder; I should let others know the same more often too.
> And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.
Man, even enterprise servers, sold directly to data centers, max out these devices at 64 gigabytes. Many are offered with a pair of 32GB SLC old-school SSDs (for the extra durability).
Using 3.84TB for this is an enormous waste unless you host half the GitHub yourself and have specified "all files under this or that size go to the special devices".
Better make a torrent or book or comics mirror or something on this pair of huge SSDs. I use a pair of 32GB extra-durable (SLC) USB pen drives for special/metadata on a fairly decent ZFS dataset (~9TB) and they have something like 4MB of taken space...
Have you put a power meter on that setup? I've always wanted to do something like this but electricity here is AU$0.27/kWh, and my house is poorly oriented for solar panels unfortunately.
It's a little under $0.12 per kWh here. I haven't gotten around to putting up a meter on it since fully completing it, but in the past, with a bit over half the drives + all of the ram and everything else, it was peaking a bit over 400w -- I'd guess like +- 700ish right now?
So, give or take, with a stupid build like mine, here, it's like .7 * 720 * $0.118 = ~$60.
Another thing to note is that mine stay spinning instead of idling for much lower energy consumption, cause I've always read that the stop-start cycle is what really tends to kill the drives.
I think it could be a lot more affordable/justifiable with:
- fewer, larger drives (6-8TB each?)
- fewer, larger DIMMs (16-32GB each?)
- perhaps slower, more energy-efficient drives (5400rpm?)
Also, I have seen some of the Atom C2750/C2758 boards for fairly cheap here.
If you don't need an absurd amount of RAM/PCIe/CPU, that could be a good option to save another bit of power.
> and my house is poorly oriented for solar panels unfortunately.
And yeah, same, unfortunately. Ironically, despite being in Florida, I barely get any sun; my entire neighborhood is filled with massive trees, lol.
I'd still like to look into solar at some point when I've got more time & money, though. It's been awful the past couple of hurricane seasons because of the trees -- something always seems to fall and cause a bunch of damage, so I'd like to cut down a few of the scary ones anyway (I am sorry trees!)
I wonder if there's any worthwhile public domain content in that backup? E.g. stuff published prior to 1925, that's not otherwise findable on the usual services (Gutenberg, IA etc.)
0 seeders on the few torrents I checked though. I mean, can't blame people for not seeding 350GB+ torrents, but still - if there aren't any seeders, what good are the torrents?
Practically speaking, if you are in the US, you could download stuff from zlib and get away with it - I believe that's not illegal. Hosting on the other hand is.
Using torrents to download is legally also hosting, albeit some random parts of what you are downloading yourself. So to stay legal in the US, you can't really use torrents.
Maybe some enterprising person in Russia or China can become a reseller of hard drives and preload them with chunks of libgen ?
I mean, it's sad that the greatest country on earth has a sneakernet gap with Cuba [1]! ;)
Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe's shitty app, you can't share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow.
I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!
Oreilly books had drm free copies you could buy. Some good deals (buy 2 get 2 free) They moved to a drm based subscription model, but because the books I bought were drm free I still can access them!
Manning still does this. (Thoug they embed your email address in the pages of the pdfs you download. I’m ok with that). They market drm free as a feature, and I look there first when looking for tech books.
“What is Manning's DRM policy? What security restrictions are enabled on the PDF eBooks? Can I print, copy and paste, etc?
Manning eBooks are DRM-free. We do personalize each eBook with a license stamp in the footer of the PDF. There are no print or copy & paste restrictions on the PDF eBooks. You can also download your eBook as many times as you want, and put it on as many devices as you wish.”
As someone who works in the ebook sector, I'll say that no one loves Adobe's DRM, whether it be the publisher, vendor or user. It's implemented by apps and such because of the network effect - other apps support it, and users want to be able to read Adobe DRMed content without trouble, and it was also the first big solution to the "problem" of ebook DRM. However, because people have to pay a fee to Adobe per license, vendors are not very happy about having to continue to tolerate it, so that provides for a great incentive to slowly get them to move to a more user-friendly alternative as long as it's zero-cost, which is what LCP is trying to solve.
Hadn't heard of LCP before. Based on some skimming of the website… how does it improve on Adobe's DRM other than cost?
It's still limited to applications that explicitly support it. Maybe there will be a wider ecosystem than Adobe's. But my current preferred reader apps all either have built-in storefronts (Kindle, Apple Books) or are open source (Calibre and Google Chrome, so I can use a Japanese dictionary extension). The former category probably won't ever support LCP, and the latter category definitely won't.
And as for longevity… who's to say LCP will still be around in 10 years or 20? At least Adobe has a big brand name.
At the end of the day, I'll keep using de-DRM plugins to get around those problems, but that's a solution that only works for people who are relatively tech savvy, not your average reader. And I'm not sure DRM will always be as ineffective as it is today.
It improves on it because the barrier to entry is much lower for apps to integrate it, and the ecosystem for LCP is arguably already much larger than for Adobe Adept. There are multiple mobile apps, the thorium reader on desktop, and more.
As for LCP being around in 10-20 yrs, the idea with LCP (excluding loans, of course) is that you don't need to be online or require a remote server to validate/access ebooks you've downloaded. You just have your "password", that is used to decrypt the book content through LCP, so as long as you still have any app that supports LCP, you still have access to the publication. I think it's the best compromise that will exist in reality for publishers that still want DRM. The entire system is open-source except a small key derivation function.
> you can only read them in [publisher-approved apps]
You can read them in LCP-approved apps. Publishers don't decide which apps are LCP-approved. There is a decent selection of apps that exists, on mobile and desktop.
(the following doesn't apply to loans, only owned books)
> you can't share them with your kids
You can, see https://www.edrlab.org/readium-lcp/faq/ "What are the advantages of LCP for users?" and "Why isn’t there a strict device limit on LCP licenses?"
> you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow
As long as there still exists an app that supports LCP, you can still open the ebook.
As I said in another comment, I think it's the best compromise that will exist in reality for publishers that still want DRM. The entire system is open-source except a small key derivation function. Note I'm not involved directly with LCP, but collaborate closely with people that do for the Readium project.
> I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!
Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don't want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.
> Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites.
DRM doesn't seem to be very good at preventing this either, though. The only thing it's really good at is making it harder for legitimate users to access their legally purchased media.
There is an inherent asymmetry to it: It only takes one sophisticated bad actor to break DRM and make a cracked book widely available, yet legitimate users not willing to break the law are suffering the inconveniences of error-prone, user-hostile systems.
I can even somewhat empathize with the idea of DRM for subscriptions or loans (otherwise there is really no incentive for users to continue paying, and durable access is not a concern either), but for outright purchased media, it really rubs me the wrong way to know that I can lose access to my stuff at any time.
It worked like this for music (Spotify and Apple Music have DRM, but iTunes and Amazon MP3/AAC purchases haven't, for example), and it's even working for eBooks in some countries: German language ePubs have been DRM free for some years now (although watermarked).
That is the reason why I still have a cellar full of books and over 1000 CDs. I refuse to let someone else take control over the content I buy after I’ve bought it. I’d be happy to pay for digital content, but if it comes with DRM, it’s a non-negotiable “No, thank you sir.”
Any coherent text that can actually be read somehow with human eyes can trivially be de-DRM'd. If nothing else with a physical book scanning machine that swipes instead of turning a page.
> Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites.
Every time a publisher mentions this to me, they look surprised when I tell them their books are already easily shared on warez sites. Complex DRM schemes, especially Adobe, limit innovation in reading applications and cause all sorts of end user issues. This in turns pushes people to find sites like zlib in the first place.
> Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading.
Does anyone do this? I don't see how it's relevant beyond "wow! you reading speed increased 5% this month" in emails from the Kindle service. Maybe they target ads for "read better and faster in 90 days" if you're in the 10th percentile on reading speed?
For all the bigger companies I've worked with that have infinite war chests and rely heavily on user data and analytics, the question is always why shouldn't a specific metric be tracked, not why should it. Even if they have absolutely no reason to track how fast you're reading, it's safe to say they're tracking it anyway. At a certain point you stop reading privacy policies or listening to what a company says it's doing or not. You even stop looking at code or inspecting network traffic. You simply assume you're being tracked in every technical way it's possible for "them" to do so, and you either accept it or change it.
That's the main reason I refuse to buy DRM'd content. It gives the companies too much control and ability to track whatever I might be doing. I'll gladly pay for good books, but I am not paying Amazon or whatever to fund their data collection megaoperation
It could also be a useful proxy for density/interestingness of the material (when adjusted for your typical reading speed). Fed into a recommender system it might produce better outputs and more purchases.
It could also be sold to publishers as part of a tool to determine the above prior to publishing; what if books were optimized for your attention?
Pleasant or not, there are plenty of uses for the data.
They can also see the things that you highlight, the things that you reread. This could be used to profile the reader and personalize ads
not only this, but being forced to buy an ebook through their portal, they'll know everything you're reading. Whereas you could read pdfs anonymously if you wanted
The Kindle app tracks how fast you're reading. If nothing else it uses it to improve it's estimate of how long until you finish reading the chapter, which it tells you.
> A customer can read your eBook as many times as they like, but we will only pay you for the number of pages read the first time the customer reads them.
As an example of how far the terminology has come, consider the purported line “Let me taste your wares”[0] from the nursery rhyme "Simple Simon", which possibly dates back to the 17th century.[1]
My wife has a Kindle, we wanted to buy an ebook to support the author but didn't want to go through Amazon anymore because it's Amazon. So we tried buying from Kobo and surprise surprise, they only work with their ereaders because of their shitty DRM! So now Kobo has permanently lost us as a customer too. Great job there folks!
Not even Amazon forces publishers to use it! There are DRM-free Kindle books available.
Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to explicitly search for DRM-free titles, but the description for these usually has a sentence like "made available DRM-free at the publisher's request", or is lacking the reference to "use limited to x devices simultaneously".
This is why I not only favor purchasing DRM-free media, but also keep a local archive of all such purchases.
$ ls /mnt/comixology | wc -l
239
(This can be a bit difficult for larger‐sized media, such as video games, but I do it anyway—my GOG archive is over two terabytes.)
I also have a small collection of DRM‐free music I had purchased and downloaded from Amazon that no longer seems to be accessible online. Certainly I have no plans to purchase anything digital from them in the future.
Including in KDP. There's a tickbox for whether you want DRM or not. Personally I'd never add DRM to mine because it's so trivial to strip anyway and just an inconvenience.
If Amazon doesn't demand it, then it must be the book publishers that are actually demanding it. So it's not just big bad Amazon after all. That's interesting.
Main reason I mind is because DRM a) creates "artificial scarcity" of an effectively "infinitely" and freely duplicate-able resource (digital bits of data) mostly to fulfill the bottomless greed-hole of corporate entities (rather than to enrich the original creator for their part in it), and b) (and this is the main reason I hate DRM) because it gives some bottomless pit of greed corporate entity the ability to arbitrarily deprive me of something I paid for, or restrict my ability to use / access it at some unknown point in time down the road, forcing me to maybe have to pay again for something I already paid for. (Nope. Not gonna do that. If I'm backed into that corner, I'll choose to "fly the Jolly Roger" and acquire a DRM-free copy some other way.)
Given the option to support content creators in some way that doesn't screw me over as a content "consumer", I'ma prefer that option all day long, every day; However, too many corporate entities these days would rather not offer that option, if they think they can find a way to make you pay every single time you lay eyeballs on something… (That is the ultimate goal of some of 'em, to be certain.)
I see it less as bottomless greed, and much more as a fear or inability to adapt to a new situation, desperately clinging to the past via technological means instead.
The music industry was the same, initially – and maybe MP3s would still be sold with DRM by default if it wasn't for Steve Jobs and the iTunes store back in the day.
There's hope, though: With very few exceptions, German e-books are also sold without DRM these days.
It doesn't. It will work with any Adobe DRM compatible reader or app even before you remove the DRM. It will also work with their apps on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac. You do have to download from your account page to get the ACSM file but with that you should be able to use Adobe digital editions to put it on a compatible non-Kobo reader like something from Pocketbook.
Removing Kobo's DRM or the Adobe version is pretty trivial too and doesn't seem to change as much as Amazon's.
But they don't support Kindle because Kindle doesn't support ePubs and Adobe DRM'd ePubs at that.
Amazon also does this right? But unlike kindle, kobo devices can easily have libre readers installed on them that can read whatever format you like. I threw koreader on my kobo and haven't looked back. It communicates with my private opds server to download books I have, ah, acquired, and converted to epub. Or sometimes PDF.
I think it can even read MOBI though, i vaguely remember accidentally uploading some to my kobo without converting and reading them before i realized the conversion step was missed.
koreader also works on my Kindle. This used to belong to my wife, and got passed to me, and got rooted by me, and koreader installed on it, thus keeping it out of a landfill or generating more e-waste.
Good for you then. Kindle devices have decent hardware but is crippled by the dystopian Amazon firmware on it. It forces upgrades, with no way to opt out, and Amazon have the ability to remotely wipe your books for no reason.
Yeah, the upgrades were why it ended up in my possession in the first place. The "upgraded" software required capabilities that the device did not have, making it super slow.
The point though, was that koreader works there too.
Ironically, I've found many of the publishers will sell DRM-free ebooks. The biggest problem I've found is books out of print but still in copyright, since we have absurdly long copyright lengths today.
The "ebook shops" are the worst. Amazon & Apple have their DRM'd copies, and Kobo may be even worse.
We keep trying to push publishers to allow us to sell their ebooks DRM-free, it really is a win-win. Less customer support for us, more sales for them, no vendor lock-in for the customer. We offer completely DRM-free or watermarked content: https://www.ebooks.com/drm-free/. I wish every publisher would embrace it.
Interestingly, all German language e-books have been DRM free for a couple of years now. I have no idea how that happened, but at one point, all major publishers have pivoted from mandatory DRM to DRM-free (but watermarked) ePubs.
The notable exception is Amazon: Kindle books are almost always DRMed from the same publishers.
I really love watermarking as a solution for DRM-Free media!
Watermarks can of course be stripped, but so can DRM--the goal is just to add an extra barrier, which watermarks do without inconveniencing legitimate customers. I actually kind of feel it adds value--it gives my purchase an authenticity a pirated copy wouldn't have.
I used ZLibrary to download e-books of books that I could only find in some crappy format (including physical). I use game-pirating sites the same way. I already purchased Secret of Mana-- why shouldn't I just re-download it?
I have a Kobo, and its store is woefully lacking (would get a Kindle if I could go back in time). So, what I do is buy the book wherever I can find it cheapest, then chuck it and pirate an e-version of it. That way, my weird conscience thinks it's OK, and I have it in the format I desire.
The entire content distribution system for all forms of media (and a lot of software) is pretty broken.
Same. I wish there were a Bandcamp-like model for ebooks: try-before-you-buy, no DRM, reasonable prices, most of the money goes to the artist. Since I've started using Bandcamp, I have bought so much music that I otherwise wouldn't have.
I too don't like waiting at stoplights or following the rules we agree to to make society work if they are inconvenient for me. Forcing people to wear masks over COVID sure was more inconvenient than having to read in an app, right? F society! F trying to all live together!
I buy a lot in polish online book stores. I've never seen any DRM-protected books yet, they always give me mobi and epub files which I can give to whoever I want. Maybe it's time to change where you buy them? :)
Heck, I'd just be happy to get an epub bundled with a physical book purchase. Most contemporary vinyl comes with digital download codes all the time, I wish books would get on that train.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service supports and protects the U.S. Postal Service and its customers by enforcing the laws that defend the nation’s mail system from illegal or dangerous use.
I think legally they can investigate whatever (alleged) crimes they want – subject to the outcome of any turf wars with other government agencies. Their official purpose may be to investigate one particular category of crimes, but it is unlikely any court is going to throw out a prosecution because the "wrong" agency gathered the evidence. Government agencies are frequently trying to expand their empires, move into new areas, prove their continuing relevance when faced with technological changes that undermine their original reason for existence.
At the extreme, you end up with agencies whose names are purely historical and have nothing to do with their current functions. A good example of that is the Railroad Commission of Texas, which no longer has anything to do with railroads–now it is the Texas state regulator for the oil and gas industry (and also surface mining for coal and uranium). I don't know why they don't just change their name to "Texas Oil and Gas Commission" or something like that. One reason, of course, is that they don't actually control their own name, the Texas State Legislature does, and it seems it likes their name just the way it is.
Authorizing funding is the responsibility of the legislative branch. Wouldn't the agencies, which are executive, need to follow the prescription of congress on use of funds to investigate?
Yes. But how restrictively does Congress word its appropriations to agencies, such as the US Postal Inspection Service? If it appropriates them money "to investigate crimes", that would entitle them to spend that money on investigating any category of crime at all (including those with no clear connection to the postal service.) I haven't read the relevant appropriations and authorizations acts, so I don't know how they are actually worded.
Also, even supposing a criminal investigation was in violation of the appropriations laws (money appropriated to investigate one type of crime being illegally redirected to investigate another type of crime instead), that (as far as I know–IANAL) isn't an issue the accused has standing to raise in court.
A (possibly) real example of this happened under the Clinton and Obama administrations, when Republicans in Congress tried to appropriate money specifically to prosecute adult pornography, and the Justice Department (allegedly) illegally spent a lot of it on child pornography prosecutions instead. But even supposing the allegation is true, it was of no legal benefit to the accused.
I can tell you from experience there is never a funding problem, agencies always in excess of cash, especially during democratic presidencies. So much flowing right now you can literally work on anything you want
I haven't seen the court filings yet, but I guess that a unauthorized (by the publisher) physical reproduction of a book (that was domestically sent through USPS, otherwise it'll be under US CBP) that just so happens that the source for the PDF used for the physical reproduction is from Z-Library.
Me, too. Although in my case, my consumption of legitimate books usually goes up because I'd get so irritated by the typos in the Z-lib copy that, if the book was interesting, I'd eventually go buy it from a legitimate source just so I could have a properly formatted copy.
It's weird how many I've grabbed look like they were native EPUBs at first glance, but the repeated typos that no human would make betrays that they were sourced from OCRs.
Exactly. The idea that there is a zero-sum trade-off between pirated books and for-profit books is nonsense. I look through hundreds of books every year - often just skimming the introduction, or most relevant chapter - and if I like them enough, I'll take them out from the library or buy them. I buy more books because of libgen and z-lib, not less.
Although I have grown increasingly frustrated with the Kindle ecosystem, I don't think this is a fair complaint. Amazon lets you download a sample of any book in their library, which is usually pretty substantial -- can be multiple chapters depending on the length of the book.
I use this mechanism as my "shopping cart" where I just freely download samples of books that seem even slightly interesting. Later I can browse through my backlog, start reading, and either file it away for later, buy it, or delete it if it's clear that it's not for me.
Everyone's different. You find that a sample that Amazon chooses for you is sufficient for you. OP finds that physically picking up the book and looking at whatever they want is sufficient for them.
The OP specifically mentioned using z-lib to get electronic copies of the books.
I agree that physically picking up the book is a satisfying experience; I find myself often browsing in physical bookstores or libraries in order to find material that I will buy on my kindle. But that's not what OP was saying or that I was responding to.
I have tried my best to skim through all the discussions and no one seems to have noticed the demand for zlibrary in third world countries. In a country like China, it is the only avenue for most researchers and students at the bottom to gain expertise. When you talk about classism, you should not ignore such groups.
In my experience, people in the USA don’t extend their moral virtues to foreign countries, and when they do it’s common for this to be done in an unequal fashion. Often, people will respond telling you that you’re guilty of “what-about-ism” despite you merely universalizing a value that they themselves claim to have. I’ve ceased trying to converse about moral virtues with my fellow Americans as a result. It’s every bit as unwelcome as talking money in the USA.
This is one of the strongest arguments for 'piracy' and it should be discussed more.
In the 'western' world piracy is a dubiously moral way to save money, and employed people can access the work by saving or doing a little more work like visiting a library.
But the copyright system prohibits much of the world from gaining knowledge and participating in culture. Over 1.9 billion people, or 26.2 percent of the world’s population, were living on less than $3.20 per day in 2015. This is not a particularly moral situation, and piracy directly addresses it at the expense of the western world's property rights.
This is such a good point. Many of us may be able to afford a couple hundred dollars for a textbook but people in poorer countries don't. Without services like Libgen and Z-lib, we are effectively restricting access to information and only making it available to an affluent class who can afford it. In my opinion, the information should flow freely... Aaron Schwartz pretty much gave his life for this principle.
I find it interesting how the domain of things people think they're entitled to is constantly expanding. As usual, at someone else's expense and backed by all sorts of rationalization.
The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Article 19:
"freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"
Universal library access over the internet seems to qualify.
Article 17:
"Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property."
Says nothing about "intellectual property".
Article 23:
"Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection."
Doesn't ban libraries, but says that authors have a right to fair pay.
Actually the Telegram bot works flawlessly.
1. access Z-lib page with TOR
2. Sign-up, get your token for the Telegram bot
3. Send your token to the bot: https://t.me/firstlibrarybot
4. Search and request your docs to the bot
i tried and it does not requieres to login to browse the site, but to download a book is says that the limit of downloads has been reached (apparently a tor connection appears as a localhost one 127.0.0.1) and then asks to login.
In an effort to prevent blacklisting of domains (oftentimes by internet providers at the DNS-level in accordance with legal procedures), Z-Library uses a homepage at a memorable domain. The homepage does not contain any infringing content, but instead lists many working mirror domains for different regions. These domains can be switched and do not need to be as memorable. For instance, some include numbers.
(can someone explain to me why every site in the world will redirect mobile browsers to a limited page but won't redirect desktop browsers back to the full featured version?)
Hi ,
Thnx for updating this. May I seek your help in accessing z library thru Tor? I have downloaded Tor browser from z library link but dont know how to proceed.
Appreciate the guidance ,
Thnx
Sorry but I need to browse through your book before I buy it. I do this for all the books I own. I need to see if I’d like it or not. Also, I hate reading on the computer and Kindle is ok but I like making notes in my books so I want the physical copy. If it wasn’t for library genesis or Z-lib I wouldn’t have bought as many books as I have. It’s an indispensable bullshit filter for me. There is no other option for me to browse through books without leaving my house, or even looking at much older books that are only available second hand without these digital catalogues.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service supports and protects the U.S. Postal Service and its customers by enforcing the laws that defend the nation’s mail system from illegal or dangerous use.
One interesting little fact from history is that the Postal Inspection Service was one of the first bulk buyers of the Tommy Gun (Thompson submachine gun).
i was once visiting a friend who worked at the US postal service. i was traveling with a backpack with gear that looked rather rough, ready to go hiking in the woods. at one point my friend took me to his office while i was in full travel gear. in the elevator he told the others that i was one of those people delivering mail in the american backcountry.
The federal government increasingly is finding interesting nooks and crannies to shove enforcement into. Customs and Border Protection is now larger than the FBI, and ICE which houses "homeland security investigations" is almost half their size. These, and other arms of government, are increasingly being used to clamp down on activity by citizens deep within US borders (such as the recent Portland riots).
Another interesting example of the phenomenon you describe is that until 2003, the Secret Service was part of the Department of the Treasury, as the agency was founded in 1865 to combat the then-widespread counterfeiting of U.S. currency.
And yet this same government randomly, arbitrarily, (or sometimes not at all) chooses to selectively enforce (or not) a wide variety of existing laws, all while busily making more new laws that may or may not be arbitrarily and randomly enforced (when / if it suits their current "agenda of the day"). It's gotten downright ridiculous, honestly.
Note that LibGen is now a subset of Z-Library, as whilst ZLib sourced LibGen to seed itself, it's not contributed its own acquisitions back to Library Genesis.
The Pirate Library Mirror (your second link) is a complete archive of Z-Library, though it's a bulk archive of several TB and not readily accessed for individual titles. The PLM is intended as a tool for building archives rather than as a direct source itself.
(The pilimi.org link itself explains much of this.)
What surprised me was that there is something called "United States Postal Inspection Service" that has some police-like law enforcement powers. Every so often you TIL something about the US.
You need to be in good physical shape, willing to work a minimum of 50 hours a week including irregular hours, be on call 24/7, and of course also not only carry a firearm but be willing to use deadly force.
Wait til you hear about the UK's Post Office wrongly prosecuting dozens of people based on its arcane technical position as a prosecutor, held since 1683 but very rarely used
It's not "police-like," the Postal Inspectors ARE police with their own police academy, their own crime lab, and everything. They are actually one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the US.
There are a lot of US agencies which have law enforcement functions - with their own armed force and powers to search, detain, seize, etc. US Postal Service has one, so does IRS, Department of Education, Library of Congress, and many other federal agencies. One could be surprised why the Postal Service is dealing with things having nothing to do with delivering mail, but mission creep is extremely common in all branches of federal government.
In Germany we have this propaganda word "Raubkopie" for pirated copies translating to "rob copy", like a copy that was acquired through robbing, i.e. through use of force.
It is quite ironic considering who really ab/uses the legal monopoly of force to rob others of their copies.
Seems like an adaptation of the word piracy, probably to make the word more compact. "Seeräuber" - another german word for pirate - translates to "sea-robber", and I've never heard of pirates sneaking onto boats to make copies of things without leaving a trace.
More impetus to sharpen our tools and their use to evade control of information by our corrupt, out of control, corporate-owned faux democratic government overlords.
The lesson is: more tor, more IPFS, DHT, encryption, federated protocols, mesh networks, and P2P in general.
This contest of power is one of the very few the People have any hope of winning.
All books should now have a link or paypal email at the back book cover so whoever read the book without pay, then find it useful and valuable, to have an effective way to send money over.
yeah it's not ideal but, there might be quite some readers pay if they know how to do that easily.
But that would encourage pirates to create fake recipients (that sound very similar to original) to channel money into their own pockets. With this incentive one can invest effort in high quality scans or OCR, well-formatted ebooks (pirated), and replace that last lime of text with own ID and flood the internet with these copies.
I suppose then we would need systems to verify that your payment is going to the intended recipient. Sure, that can be spoofed non-trivially too, but I'm sure it's possible to make it good enough without being perfect.
bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion still up on TOR. fuck them i aint paying for my textbooks. never had a book bill higher than $50 and not about to start now.
it's doable cuz most unis have nice scanning equipment u can use for free in the library. i have literally made over $1000 in a semester scanning a textbook nobody had PDFed and reselling it electronically. it wasn't even offered in digital format by the publisher.
I am in the stage below higher education (equivalent to SAT's), meaning most pupils don't have jobs or have only been in work for a few months (A National insurance number is given at 16 and is needed to enter work), we have 3 / 4 subjects on average and 2 books per subject which is about £420 in total, however the UK is pretty facilitating to low income households and provides them with grants to afford the costs, we do have a school library meaning we can take out books, but we have to return them within a short window of time and we cannot write on them which makes them redundant for some subjects.
Am a pretentious whiner?, Yes. Will I keep on pirating textbooks? Yes
No, their content is shit and everything I've touched has 90's era VHS to digital transcriptions or half-assed attempts at interactive stuff which isn't integrated into the core. They're also limited to textbook format even when you have the ebook/online version, and the latter comes with absolutely atrocious UIs.
I can get college lectures at various levels for free, I can get a variety of interactive programs for free (or make them myself). Not to mention for a lot of the classes I've had, the textbook was not necessary at all - but I was dumb enough to buy a couple before I got wise.
They have a market cornered and it's bullshit and their service is repugnant, they need the air taken out of them.
How much does it cost to make a textbook and have a few editors? There are on average about 20 million college students in the US and for core books and common fields there are tens or hundreds of thousands of students taking those courses every semester. 50,000 students can easily cover the authoring and editing of a textbook and still reap a massive profit with a small fee of $20 per book.
using the word "consumer base" to describe a population of people doing what today is apparently the bare minimum to have consistently good material conditions in this society seems insane to me
I can't believe that societies allow education to be so profit-driven and motivated. It's so blatantly classist.
'textbook' covers a lot of ground--it could mean something widely used in a lot of schools, or something hyper-specialized. It could be a book that needed a lot of editorial and production work, or none at all.
reasonable ends when books that don't need to change have yearly editions... IE: math books. Math hasn't changed in centuries - core pieces of it. Yet, for some reason, you need 2022 Math Unchained with an Access Code to attend a class and the only changes are... perfunctory changes to the 2022 version? Good thing the costs are attached to your tuition so no only do you pay hundreds for the materials but you get to pay interest on the college loans for decades to come!
idk but i don't. cause the expensive textbooks are not the $40 ones my upper level classes have. they're the $200 intro class ones where 1000s of students take the course from a single school and there's some shitty online access code bs paired with it.
also, it is def not "reasonable" to repeatedly re-release editions just to make old ones useless.
i usually enjoy reading the $40 upper level ones a lot more btw.
zlib might be infringing, and obviously they CAN do it, but: Why the USPS? (They presumably have no direct rights over the material.) And presumably the USPS has no actual rights in Poland or Hong Kong. :(
That’s my justification for downloading movies. I was never gonna buy it anyway, and my partner was always going to buy it anyway (olive theory is real) so it makes literally no difference.
Good question, I was wondering this too. From Wikipedia, I found:
> .cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. It is administered by a United States company, VeriSign, through a subsidiary company, eNIC, which promotes it for international registration as "the next .com".
that might work, yes. I wouldn't expect it to last forever though because the US gov doesn't like jurisdictions that evade their power. Russians could seize it if they felt like it too. I have some experience with that.
Ideally you would exploit bad diplomatic relations between nations to keep things running. Mutually non cooperative jurisdictions can actually be good for the internet. I do think the intention of the US gov is to completely control the internet though, copyright and DRM violations being a major motivation. As much as they claim they are about 'cooperation and collaboration' or some other nonsense, it's really about hard power.
well .su is Russia. Not sure how to say this without pissing a lot of people off but it would not surprise me if there were some treaties they signed to cooperate with US LE in the not-so-distant future based on how things are going. Also they can seize the domain for themselves.
the .to domain I believe can be seized but I don't know the conditions. .is can be seized but it is rare. The other thing is that treaties can be changed and the US can strong-arm people. Right now they work, I don't know if they always will.
They would really only take it down if Russian media was on there and they complained in Russian court. That’s why rutracker got in trouble. No local victim = no crime according to Russia and in practice most countries actually. Problem is libgen has lots of Russian stuff.
Well, if the domain names are seized, maybe we could connect directly to the IP address? Does anyone know the IP address of z-lib domains (b-ok.cc or z-lib.org)? This is going to make me want to keep a local log of all IP addresses which the domain names map to :(
What is interesting is that this does not appear to be a Verisign operated domain. The operator appears to be based entirely outside the US. I wonder how difficult it was to seize the domain.
But it shows a block notice coming from Greece with the local message from the local copyright organization. This is really interesting, seems like there is a global list that local organizations also use and ask ISPs to do DNS redirections
Well, the one good thing about this is it has forced me to learn about Tor and to download the Tor browser. I'd heard about Tor before, but never really looked into it.
It may have been functional before but now it says domain name has been seized by the Department of Homeland Security and displays a copyright notice. The onion link is still functional though!
I always loved downloading them DRM-free. Because it felt like I had actually owned it instead of just reading it from some website that could snatch it back at any second. I know Library Genesis is still up and running fine, but this is a warning of things that could happen.
An update: I tried accessing the IP address directly a while ago and the Department of Homeland security was displaying a copyright notice saying that copyright infringement is punishable by a fine up to $200,000. Currently, there is an FBI notice saying they had a warrant from a New York court.
Does the Department of Justice not think it's worth spending half an hour making something a bit more accessible? No text, not even an alt tag on that image.
Shockingly bad and surprisingly non-compliant!
Como va a hacer a partir de ahora habrá una nueva página en la web o tendremos que descargar alguna app amo mucho a z-library para no saber como ingresar de nuevo, encontré libros muy buenos ahí
Don't use US based domains if you suspect there might be a possibility in the future that some US agency or entity can seize you domains? Applies for any other jurisdiction.
You can use decentralized alternative domain name systems. OpenNIC is completely decentralized and there are a few projects which implement DNS on a blockchain, that would be the best solution to this kind of a problem.
Unfortunately, for me custom DNS providers aren't really useable unless I'd set up a fully configurable custom resolver, because with alternative DNS providers the IPs I receive for anything hosted by Akamai tend to be in a part of their CDN that has positively abysmal peering arrangements with my ISP.
Wikipedia currently lists zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion as the Tor address on their page[1]. Does z-library have two tor addresses?
ZLib was always just an interface for Library Genesis, which remains hale and hearty here: https://libgen.is
It seems like ZLib was seized mainly because they started running donation drives and potentially earning money on piracy, although that's just conjecture. Libgen does not do any such thing.
The mental gymnastics happening in this thread to justify pirating books is pretty disappointing.
Especially on HN, where I think a lot of our livelihoods depend on writing and charging for closed source code that can technically be infinitely distributed.
How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy, and then leave a PayPal link in the footer asking for donations? Why should authors be any different?
In academic books' case, there is a parasite in between the author and reader: the publisher. Which we know they tends to charge exorbitant price for copyediting or digitizing by low-cost labor. The authors receive only a tiny fraction of the sale if not nothing. I will do whatever I can to help the parasites die.
For non-academic books, I don't know how things works, maybe there is a mechanism where the author can gain revenue from selling books. So I always pay for them and the priated copy I downloaded is just for archival.
Similar is the case from people who can't afford. They are not asking you to give it for free.
What they want is that the information accessible at affordable prices. The current situation is an ABC book either cost $10-$20-$30 or they can get it pirated. there is no middle ground.
People move to piracy due to lack of affordability and options.
Ah, the downvotes from the extremely privileged (most of whom do not even realize this).
I am from one of those countries where we pretty much cannot afford "legal" content. In my shitty town the median salary is something like $300, at least half of which goes towards paying rent if you don't have your own house, while we're being asked to pay prices that were established for developed countries with median salaries at 10× of ours or above.
Steam is one of very few exceptions and it's really popular here even among students and such (just like everywhere else).
Basically, if you want to charge me $50 for the book, you're not losing anything, simply because I cannot afford it anyway. Imagine if you had to pay $500 for books, $600 for movies, etc.
Interesting. I don’t know where you’re from. But in India, usually publishers publish an Exclusive to South Asian market version of the book which costs around $4-$20.
For example, The Pragmatic Programmer costs $10 in Indian stores, while it costs $50 in US.
In eastern europe sometimes it is the lack of legal options to actually access content. Example: star wars shows were unaccessible in any way other, academia papers, lots of books are not translated and published etc.
Using Amazon as a way to donate to authors when it takes 70% of the cut (authors get less for physical books) and delivers an inferior service to zlibrary is absurd. That’s not morality, that’s servitude. At least PayPal only takes a few percent.
If you feel bad about privacy, pay a random author half the Amazon price of your library and you’ll be a better person than somebody who meekishly shovels Bezos a ton of money in misguided morality. One that makes reading an exclusive right of the wealthy.
I don't think thats true. Obvious example would be offline desktop apps like photoshop, any single player game, etc.
Less obvious but just as relevant would be Snowflake, Clickup, etc letting me just deploy and host their software in our data center instead of relying on their cloud.
I really disagree. I work in academia in Europe, where we are in the ludicrous position of writing articles and books with public funding, which are gifted to publishing companies who then sell it back to the public at extortionate prices. Articles are just pdfs, and copyrighting them and charging subscriptions only big-budget libraries can afford, is as inane as it is anti-democratic.
Copyright should be 5-10 years tops if that at all.
I work at a large national library and teach at a university, so have to deal with copyright issues every day. Everyone agrees copyright is broken.
I release all my personal code under MIT license, and if someone does want to violate that license by not attributing me I am completely fine with that.
A lot of our livelihoods depend on access to books and journal articles that are sold at exorbitant prices by scientific publishers for whom we do all the work of editing, copyediting, reviewing, and writing ... Not all of os work in the well funded USA ... I have to go through a paywall to read my own old articles ...
As a lawyer, I can't recommend it, but I absolutely cannot discern any moral difference whatsoever between reading a library book for free and purchasing it later if I like it, and doing the same first thing by downloading the ebook from somewhere "unapproved." It's all very silly.
If a book (even an ebook) is in the library, it's already bought and paid for so the author gets whatever compensation they get as if it is a normal sale. I don't think arguing morals makes sense because of how subjective one's morals are, but, by using libraries, you are supporting the arts, whether you liked the book or not, and this is not a silly distinction.
If my local library already owns the book and it is not checked out, what is the difference between driving there to check it out and downloading it illegally online? The impact to the author is the same: absolutely nothing.
No, the impact is different. The library doesn't pay for the ebook just once. When the library buys the ebook, they're allowed to lend it a certain number of times before they have to buy the book again. Or they pay for a number of lends per day and payments for the books checked out are distributed to the appropriate publishers.
The relationship between physical book checkouts and author/publisher revenue is less direct, but the ebook contracts are an attempt to emulate decay and damage to physical books that require periodic repurchases. Arguably you are hastening the end of a physical book's life and its need to be repurchased, or need to stock more copies, by checking it out.
Please don't misunderstand my explanation to be an endorsement of standard ebook lending contracts.
why do we need "publishers" in today's market?is not like you have to have 4 intermediaries to sell on amazon or even digital copies? i'd be more forthcoming to pay $10 for a book that i know 50-70-90% proceeds go to the author than 2-4-5% which the rest take up?
publishers, printers, yada yada must've been important to sell books 50 years ago but are they really necessary today?
Does it? I genuinely doubt this; and if it does -- is this current system by which it happens worth keeping (i.e. is not merely legacy gatekeeping by incumbents?)
ah, so the one who is supposed to make money from his/her skill is given pittance while distribution and marketing people take the cake. fine.
edit:
if onlyfans can allow questionable skills be monetized and give millions to the um, performers, surely an author can find a way to sell their own books themselves
> the one who is supposed to make money from his/her skill is given pittance while distribution and marketing people take the cake
You may want to read on the economics of publishing instead of working off assumptions [1]. Scientific publishers are a scam. But trade fiction and nonfiction publishing isn’t a moneymaker.
i need some numbers... $100 book(fiction for ease of understanding), how much does each entity in the chain from author to consumer earns?
if that is the economics, where does digital books and audibooks fare? why do you need the intermediaries in that thing? same for amazon? its not like i HAVE to pay a printer to publish a digital ebook so if that is removed from the pie, shouldn't the author "get" that portion also?
so what is the role of publishers and marketers and whole dinosaur industry that should die already.
i've had a proposal. From a $100 physical book, an author makes say 5%. That is all their work as the original work and remuneration they get so if we move to digital, how about the author double or triple that to say $15. add another $5 for delivery and the same book now costs me $20 and the author gets "more" money, something they actually want and what i want, to consume the content created and support the author and be easy on the wallet.
this would probably kill the paper book model overnight but i really don't have concerns about the poor publishers and printers who would go out of job
Self-publishing isn't free, and usually requires guidance from a professional resource to do properly without your book being lost in the chaff. You may get a higher percentage of return, but haven spoken to a fellow community member who has done self-publishing and writing for a major publisher, they commented they would never do self-publishing again.
My books are both in eBook format and paperback. ~400-500 hundred pages in length. The hundreds of hours spent writing the book/taking screenshots, formatting, does not pay off, at least for technical books.
Creating technical books is purely for the notoriety, possibly job prospects, etc., IME. I've had wonderful community feedback which is certainly a self-esteem boost (maybe ego, which isn't necessarily a good thing :)), but it is only going to buy me a few cups of coffee at Starbucks.
The physical degradation of the books seems like such a minor effect. I'm pretty gentle with books. As for library ebooks, I had no idea the contracts were structured like that.
Like with so many physical possessions, it really varies from person to person. Some people have libraries full of books they've read, and all their books are in pristine condition. Look at their other possessions and they're all in excellent condition.
Other people, you loan them one paperback book, and when you get it back it looks like it's been dropped off a highway overpass bridge and run over in rush-hour traffic. Look at other possessions that person has, and you'll see the same thing: they're all beat up and pieces of them are broken.
Some people are just destructive for some reason, and it's entirely from carelessness, not malice.
"Some people are just destructive for some reason, and it's entirely from carelessness, not malice. "
And then some people simply consider books as objects for use, and not sacred reliques to be touched only with glothes.
(unless we are talking about historical books)
I mean, books or rather the information in them is kind of sacred to me. But the physical objects are just paper, that can be printed out again, if it has been in too heavy use. And heavy use includes them to be in a tightly packed backpack, close to saltwater or rain, among other things. If I would treat books as fragile things, I would only read them at home, which means, I would miss out on them a lot, as I like to go outside and travel.
Dipping your book in sea water is not normal "heavy use". If you do that to your library book the library will probably make you purchase a new one.
Anyways the reason to treat library books reasonably nicely (not with gloves, but like a reasonable person) is not because books are sacred. Its because library books are not yours, they are something you are borrowing from someone else. Treating other people's possesions that you are borrowing with respect is just common courtsey.
"If you do that to your library book the library will probably make you purchase a new one."
Sure thing, which is why I would not do this with libary or borrowed books in general, but rather buy it cheap second hand, before I take them to the beach with me.
"Treating other people's possesions that you are borrowing with respect is just common courtsey."
Sure thing. I was refering to the general habit of rough use of books, not that it is nice or acceptable to treat borrowed things badly.
It sounds like you're one of those people who can't handle everyday objects without breaking them somehow.
I'm not talking about treating things as extremely fragile, I'm just referring to being able to use and handle things without somehow destroying them in short order. The people who do this are just like you: they think it's normal and think everyone else is overly cautious, when in reality they're just a clumsy oaf. These are also the kind of people you can't lend tool to, because they'll destroy them, by doing things like using a screwdriver as a pry-bar.
What nonsense. We were talking about physical books here; indeed when I went hiking in de olden days (not that many years ago), I would pack paperbacks in my backpack to read and they would not survive the trip well; it rains, the backback is tightly packed but things rub, it’s moist outside (and if you sleep in hiking huts, also inside) and sometimes things just go wrong. I also like to read in the (hot)tub and water splashes, it’s, again, moist because of steam etc. Oh, sometimes my dogs ate a book that I was reading on the couch and put aside to go for a walk etc. People have dropped teapots or beer or food on books I was reading on pub outside tables.
What has this to do with tools? Or other stuff; I have pristine computers from 70s-80s, I have handhelds like the openPandora that I used 10 years daily and look brand new. Almost all (I developed software for old phones and new phones over the last 20 years so I have many of them for testing) my mobile phones I had in my life, working still or not, look new still (the few that don’t have cracked glass). One has nothing at all to do with the other.
These days you can get water resistant e-readers and phones, so now the books don’t suffer in these circumstances; if people enjoy the physical more than the elements will still mess iup these books if you don’t read them on a couch at home. Well, the dogs…
Also, stop calling people oafs. No need for personal attacks here.
There can be many reasons for being clumsy; mental (stress/burnout), neural (Parkinson/stroke/spinal damage), physiological (rheumatism/tendon damage/nerve damage) and substance abuse. And some people are just clumsy; not much they can do about it; oaf means more (in a bad way) than just clumsy.
Yes. Realistically, I could put in the extra effort to be mindful of how I handle the things I own -- but I simply don't care enough.
If you lend me a paperback book, it's likely going to be dog-eared and written inside with pen; and the covers will almost certainly have creases all over. In my view, paperback books are cheap, mass-produced disposable goods that were meant to be thoughtlessly handled (e.g. reading at the beach).
If you lend me a KNIPEX plier wrench, it's likely going to be used as a hammer, for when I'm simply too lazy to go get one. It will be left out in the rain, completely uncovered. Why? Because I simply do not care. If it becomes rusted or visibly broken, I will buy a replacement -- but I will not go out of my way to treat material, unthinking, unfeeling objects with any respect or dignity.
I consider the necessity of most physical things we own an annoyance; and the responsibility of caring for them a self-imposed burden I have no interest in carrying.
"by doing things like using a screwdriver as a pry-bar. "
Oh, of course I have done this - with an old rusty screwdriver, but not with a tool of precision.
But since you are getting personal: well then maybe you are also one of those persons who have everything as looks shiny, but when doing things in the dirt of real life, you would put absent minded a chainsaw or powerdrill on the ground? Which is something I would never do, but have witnessed a few times from the look shiny folks (where the tools get probably polished later). I just treat objects adequately. Printed out paper is printed out paper. A rusty piece of metal, is a rusty piece of metal. And a high precision machine is a high precision machine, where different standards and care apply.
edit: in case of misunderstanding: I was not saying above, that I think it is OK, to treat borrowed things badly. Only that I think it is OK to treat my books as objects for rough use.
You should not touch historical books with gloves. It is generally correct to use your bare hands. The reason why you would wear gloves while handling a book is to protect you, perhaps because the book has been contaminated with hazardous chemicals or something.
Anyway.
It is also my experience that some people completely destroy their books. I don't know how it happens. I don't think of myself as careful with books. I shove them in backpacks, insert random objects to remember my place, take them outdoors, etc. Yet somehow, the books look much the same afterwards.
Part of this is just knowing how to pack books to avoid damaging them. Simple stuff like putting the spine down. If I'm going outside in the rain, keep the book out of the water. If I'm shoving something in my backpack and there's already a book inside, just check to make sure I'm not shoving something directly into the book.
>It is also my experience that some people completely destroy their books. I don't know how it happens. I don't think of myself as careful with books. I shove them in backpacks, insert random objects to remember my place, take them outdoors, etc. Yet somehow, the books look much the same afterwards.
Yep, this is me too, and with everything else I own too. I don't treat them like museum objects, but they generally look very good even after lots of use.
Some people just can't do this. Honestly, I don't know why. It's just how they are. Maybe they don't have an intuitive sense of how much force is really needed to handle things, and they use far too much? Much like a small child. I'm not sure. Hence my use of the term in another post, "clumsy oaf".
You can see this with some people's cars too. You get in a normal person's car that's a few years old, and it looks fine, though maybe the seating surfaces are obviously not brand-new and it's not perfectly clean. But you get in one of these oaf's cars, and even after a year, it's completely destroyed inside and the interior looks like it's decades old.
Stop calling people oafs or ‘small child’. No need for personal attacks here.
There can be many reasons for being clumsy; mental (stress/burnout), neural (Parkinson/stroke/spinal damage), physiological (rheumatism/tendon damage/nerve damage) and substance abuse. And some people are just clumsy; not much they can do about it; oaf means more (in a bad way) than just clumsy.
Seems people using objects different from how you use them triggers you. Maybe not everyone feels like washing and vacuuming their car every Saturday? Or ever? What’s it to you and how does it make them oafs?
Only with books in certain cases, not the rest. The word Oaf triggers me though: you are calling people stupid who care less than you about physical goods or who are ‘clumsy’. That’s good for nothing in an adult discussion.
Ok, maybe that word wasn't really what I was looking for. I was trying to describe clumsy people, not stupid people. Lots of people are clumsy and careless without being idiots.
If you break a book at the library, you usually have to pay for its replacement.
Sure there is some normal wear and tear that isnt "breaking the book", but if you browse through your library you will find lots of books that were purchased 20-40 years ago that are still in good shape. I don't really think normal wear and tear is very significant.
I mean, from where i'm sitting the logic is "how can we extract as much revenue as possible", with the wear and tear argument being post hoc justification.
Libraries use checkout frequency to determine which books to stock and which books to stock more of. The more an author's books are checked out of a library, the more likely that library is to buy more copies of that book, as well as more copies of other books by that author.
It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, criminalizing merely observing something and independently reproducing it with your own private materials for your own non-commercial use. IMO it shakes to the core free market, capitalist, and founding principles of our nation.
> It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights,
Ah, you’ve mistaken capitalism (which had been developing for centuries earlier) with 18th century liberal economic theory, which is not its foundation but instead a rough ex-post-facto rationalization for large parts of the way it had developed.
What capitalism is, though, is the systematic prioritization of the interests of the mercantile (which became, as legal property rights coalesced around their interest, capitalist) class as the organizing principle of society.
Even further, all too many conflate much of the above with mere "commerce," a word I've been trying to inject into this.
LITERALLY NO ONE DOES, or SHOULD, HAVE A PROBLEM WITH COMMERCE. People are always going to buy and sell things. All the other stuff is details on exactly what the rules about doing this should be.
AFAIK copyright applies even to certain materials that have not, and never will enter commerce. Of course there are certain non-commercial exceptions to US copyright law. (Note: this is not legal advice). IMO copyright law exceeds even the bounds of commerce, and thus cannot be simply called a "rule" of commerce.
>an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market[0]
>which had been developing for centuries earlier
The use of capital has existed for thousands of years already. One could make the case that there is no such thing as capitalism but rather the desire for the realization of interests. The ruling class "before capitalism" was also capitalist: the lords' power was derived from their capital- the land. The only real difference between the mercantile class and the landed gentry was the respect they commanded when it comes down to it.
The ruling class before capitalism was not capitalist — the nature of property rights in land was very different under feudalism than it is under capitalism.
See dragonwriter's point above mine. Specific property rights are not necessary for capital to exist. Can you explain then why the nature of property rights was so different that ownership of it could not be consideres capital? Keep in mind that nobles could in fact sell their land at many points and places during medievil history.
Aditionaly, I made the case that one could say there is no capitalism. Could you explain, then, what capitalism is and why it would somehow only exist from the 18th century or later?
Weirdly, I'm OP, and I disagree. Fundamentally, without them, you get more situations like what's going on with Stable Diffusion and Copilot (and perhaps Spotify and Google before them) -- the people who own the machinery end up owning and controlling EVERYTHING, and the creator gets nothing.
There's no actual "free market" in the way you're thinking of. Thumbs will always be on scales.
>There's no actual "free market" in the way you're thinking of. Thumbs will always be on scales.
I don't follow this argument. Principles can't be replicated perfectly in reality, therefore they don't exist? By that logic, there is no actual "copyright" as some people will be copying material and getting away with it.
>the people who own the machinery end up owning and controlling EVERYTHING, and the creator gets nothing.
This is proven wrong through any single example to the contrary. One example is ticketed book readings by the original author, or a ticketed concert by the original band. Many ways to capture income for generating content without copyright enforcement mechanisms.
>what's going on with Stable Diffusion and Copilot (and perhaps Spotify and Google before them) -- the people who own the machinery end up owning and controlling EVERYTHING, and the creator gets nothing.
Is this an argument for or against copyright? Does Google get most of its operating revenue within nations without copyright law? Or is the argument they are violating copyright law and that's why the creator isn't getting anything?
And there are counter examples, where a creator sells/relinquishes copyright (often because it's the only way for them to end up with anything) and ends up losing total access to income streams they could have had if copyright didn't exist, and the machinery owner ends up owning everything and locking the creator out through copyright law. The confusion also lies in the fact creator and copyright holder is not the same thing.
I mean, you can't really think about this in a useful way if you don't first grasp "exaggeration for rhetorical effect." It's so odd that I'd have to preface things I say with that. "The people who own the machinery end up with overwhelming power and the creators get very little." Sigh.
Again, for better or worse --without IP, the primary beneficiaries of "creativity" become the distributors. Opposing this is the whole point of copyright, and thus why it should defended in theory and heavily reformed in practice.
It doesn't blow my mind, we are quite a regulated society as much as my libertarian heart wishes we weren't. I generally agree that copyright needs to die, but for it to die, there has to be some private market system for determining provenance for ideas & intellectual capital and rewarding those ideas financially.
It's nothing in isolation of your single act. Maybe. In aggregate it of course deprecates the library(they have e-checkouts already but you're talking untracked piracy). I like libraries; I think they're mostly performative in small towns and providing social services in cities rather than functioning as actual libraries. Kinda sad.
I pirate all my books btw, just saying if everyone did it ofc there'd be(already is) impact. Easily smartphones+kindle is worse though.
> I like libraries; I think they're mostly performative in small towns and providing social services in cities rather than functioning as actual libraries. Kinda sad.
The library in the small town I grew up in is still lending lots of books and ebooks in addition to lending movies and music and providing computer access, training and other services. The library down the street from where I live now is the same. Libraries are more vibrant and active now then when I was a kid.
Where are you that libraries have become "performative"?
New ways of using books are coming up - you put 1TB of books on your SSD, index it for search and use a neural net on it. Ask a question or pose a task, the model retrieves passages and then computes the reply.
For this to work what is needed is a blanket license for search and snippet use. Can't buy a whole library for such a sparse use case, ain't gonna read it in the classical sense. This approach can guarantee the generated text will not replicate the source material, just use it for reference, with citations.
So essentially, we have a system where a public entity (public libraries) is compensating authors for creating works that are popular. But going through a middle man (the publisher, and possibly one or more distributors) that takes a considerable cut.
In the digital age, why not cut out the middle man? Have a publicly funded e-library that pays authors directly based on how often their content is downloaded.
Sure, but that whole deal of "publisher signed an agreement with the author" only exists because publishers used to be necessary. They're not now.
Yes, you shouldn't arbitrarily decide anything. You can today, however, meaningfully conclude that "publishers are kind of useless, how are they still in business when much of what they do isn't necessary?" You'll find the answer is probably old law.
So, yes -- bring on the lawsuits. Let's see what happens.
ok, so don't bypass publishers for existing works, but set it up in a way so that authors can publish books in this library themselves if they so desire (and pay for editing, marketing, etc. themselves).
> I don't think arguing morals makes sense because of how subjective one's morals are
[not related to OP] I have a similar feeling every time someone moralizes in any discussion: we could argue about morality, but we need to start with a common moral framework and define what "good" and "bad" are first. Everyone assumes these are generally agreed upon but the devil is in the details when discussing something like the OP.
End the intellectual property monopolies, and instead give organizations the right to distribute creative works so long as downloads are tracked through some robust means, and then compensate authors accordingly.
Don’t outlaw libraries just because the internet now exists or legalize them but only with absurdities like fucking wait lists.
Not my experience at all. I regularly lend e-books from my city's public library, and they usually have hundreds of "copies" available for popular titles, and even for less popular or even niche titles I rarely have to wait more than one week.
It is a bit ridiculous that "buying copies" and then imposing artificial scarcity on these is the best mechanism that libraries and publishers have figured out to compensate content producers, but I'm optimistic that they'll eventually figure something out.
The price per read (most people don't re-read most books they buy... if they even read them through once) is dramatically lower even for ebooks which have separate licensing. In the case of printed books, because the right of first sale keeps primary and wholesale markets roughly in line between readers buying retail and libraries buying retail, the price per read is even lower... propped up only due to the incidental problem of books wearing out on average after 10-20 loan-outs. If people took better care of physical library books, the price per read would approach zero.
Perhaps more importantly, the cost of books in libraries is not assigned based on the number of books checked out or read. It tends to be people in lower and lower-middle economic classes who use libraries more, even while they pay less than the per-capita average cost to keep those libraries running and their shelves stocked.
Libraries are communist entities. Even worse than that, from a capitalist perspective, although checking out books requires you to be connected with the tax base or funding source for the library, you can generally go to any public or academic library and read books on-site even if you're from another country or planet and aren't entitled to check anything out.
If the majority of customers for a given book are libraries and whatnot then it's no longer viable to make such a work. Mind you, I still think the whole thing is broken at its core and that we'd be better off if it were abolished, but would that sort of major change in incentives qualify as a moral difference?
The internet 'hates copyright', it wants to link everything up. Search hates copyright, can't work unless everything is open to indexing. Now the AI hates it even more, gobbling up everything ever written or imaged and creating derivatives at the click of a button.
I don't think copyright has a future, the general trend is against it. Graphical artists have already realised it only takes a second to imitate any style or content. What's the point of copyrighting a book when anyone can generate any text just for their own use, when it's so cheap and fast we throw away the result after one use?
The difference is we had the library debate back in the 1800s, which is so long ago that people have forgotten it was once as controversial to publishers as ebooks are now.
I think you described one scenario that's not representative of all the issues, and then a reader might accidentally think the "it's all very silly" is the takehome message for all the issues.
Also, as a lawyer, couldn't you come up with some a decent counterargument re moral differences, if you had to?
Oh it's stealing. Someone wants to get paid for the work, and they're entitled to get paid.
I think people who know it's stealing, but are willing to download books anyway because of their personal risk/reward calculation (or perhaps they dislike the author and don't mind stealing from him!), have an intact moral compass: They know right from wrong.
I wonder about people who try to rationalize the crime of book-stealing away. Do they know right from wrong?
I won't judge people who decide to steal books, but I don't like those who try to argue it's not theft.
And as a lawyer, I don't like when people conflate "copyright infringement" with theft.
Stealing/theft is best thought of not as "getting a thing for free that you're not entitled to" -- it's "depriving someone of their property," which copying ain't.
So they steal them. Sometimes you need to do what you need to do in order to survive. I'm just saying you shouldn't try to argue that it's "not stealing" if you decide the reward is greater than the risk, or the net benefit exceeds the transgression.
It's obviously not exactly the same as stealing, since you are only denying the person one very specific use of their "property" (which only recently has been artificially made property, through copyright laws). That specific use you are denying them is not the right of sale even, but the right of a monopoly on distribution. Of course, if it starts materially affecting the person's capacity to live a reasonable lifestyle, then it becomes a different moral issue, and there is still a moral judgment to be made regardless, but that is not the same thing at all as conflating unauthorized copying, which widens possession in a way that could potentially have averse effects, and the absolute of theft, which changes it in a zero sum way, and necessarily has averse effects.
As one example, I know a guy who pays for online streaming subscriptions, but still pirates to not be forced through a crappy experience because people are attempting to extract the last penny and get as rich as possible through spying and ads, tiers of resolution, device restrictions, etc. I see no reason why there is any moral issue with bypassing their chosen distribution monopoly, especially because they are not starving. I strongly disagree with the tenet that extreme capitalistic gain is a right, and thus cannot consider intellectual property rights as such an absolute. Now, if one is to download something that someone earning a modest living made, and which has a real material impact on them providing for a reasonably comfortable life for themselves and their family, personally I consider that a problem, but that is quite rare (not least of all because smaller content producers are usually being exploited and making very little from distribution). It's not the likely case even with just a modicum of awareness in what and when you decide to download something.
> Inability to earn adequate living: indeed just 57% of full-time published authors derived 100% of their individual income from writing-related work in 2017, and much of that writing income comes from activities such as speaking engagements, the teaching of writing, editing or translating the works of other authors, ghostwriting, etc. rather from book advances and royalties. Only 21% of full-time published authors derived 100% of their individual income from book-related income.
In terms of income:
> Median incomes of all published authors who were surveyed—including part-time, full-time, traditionally published, self-published, and hybrid-published authors—for all writing-related activities[1] was $6,080, down 3% from four years ago. This is down from a $10,500 median income in 2009 according the Authors Guild’s last survey[2]. Worse still, the median income for all published authors based solely on book-related activities[3] fell from $3,900 to $3,100, down 21%, while full-time traditionally published authors earned $12,400.
So effectively, not paying for a book has a high likelihood of taking a decent percentage of a writers income.
Like I said, make an educated decision. However, the largest reason that authors make so little is that the publishing houses overwhelmingly give them next to nothing. So no, downloads are not the problem. Anecdotally, I have never had an author not send me a digital copy of a book I requested from them (generally because they were hard to get). At the same time, it is pretty obvious which authors are smaller and would thus fall into the category of "people to look out for" I indicated in my first post. And again, I am not here advocating for downloading, simply pointing out that it is quite different than strict theft (which is pretty obvious), and those who claim otherwise, by using a simplistic argument, lose a large part of their audience immediately.
Exactly. Not even a bit. It’s just if you don’t kowtow to globohomo you have to use the darknet now. Which is good, drives more people off the clearweb and hurts our censors and nannies.
