I love Z-library, it's obvious that once we've found a means of transmitting books as "code/software/bits", the concept of copyright was changed forever, the catalog available in Z-library is superb, and the site is easy to navigate.
What I see talked way less is that the quality of new books, in light of this, is very bad. Most books out there that were published in the 21st century serve as business cards. Commoditizing the complement, they call it.
It doesn't take too many esoteric texts at $100 plus to make the university library photocopier a very attractive proposition at 5c per A4 page. Copyright law flexibility. Or there's LibGen.
The article says that's how many people have signed up with an academic email address.
Think about that...I would never in a million years sign up for a piracy site with such an important email address that's publicly tied to my reputation. So if 600k people have done that, the number in total must be absolutely colossal.
Don’t be surprised if the founders are going to be used in prisoner exchange between Russia and US. More then anything, this is about catching as many Russians as possible to put pressure to release detained Americans.
The textbook industry is on a similar ethical level as the Chinese fentalogue export industry. Not quite as evil as the American health insurance industry, but close. There are definitely situations where the ethics of piracy/file sharing are murky, but the only complaint I have about Z-Library and LibGen sharing textbooks is that it's probably not enough to put them completely out of business. Pirate harder.
The US textbook industry that is. UK univesities often don't have required textbooks for courses at all (instead you get things like PDF notes being provided directly to students, and often with printed copies subsidised too), and where they do older editions are almost always acceptable (unless it's a course in a subject that moves very quickly where the older edition would genuinely be outdated), and there will usually be some copies available in the library too.
It was next door to the main faculty building and they could pirate any textbook you needed. You didn't even need to know the name of the book, you could just say "I need the book for so and so professor's so and so class" and they'd print it out for you. All the source files were already on their copy machines' hard drives.
While technically illegal, this was fully endorsed by faculty and administration in the "If you need books, don't go next door and print them there. Under no circumstances are you to do that. Again, don't under any circumstances go next door and ask for these books at 5 cents per page. And whatever you do, do _not_ ask for 2 pages per page in tiny print to make it cheaper"
Same in Italy when I was a student some twenty years ago.
Noticeably, this was done at multiple print shops in the university area, and you could get a discount or a free copy if you brought the original when a new book was chosen.
The whole academic establishment basically was aware of this, except for a few professors who insist on selling their own book, but it's typically in humanities or social sciences.
copyright oligarchs are ruthless. in Tunisia we had UN supported "Tunis model law on copyright for developing countries" since 1967 which includes provisions against copyright for teaching, research and health.
Fun story, I had a professor in university that tried to force us to buy his own book for his course, refusing to provide notes or any other free alternatives, and for the final exam he allowed anyone to bring in his book.
We complained to the school board as this was unfair and there was a conflict of interests, the exam was redone by a committee and a new professor replaced him the next year.
Damn. Early in my college years I took a course from a lecturer who made us buy not one but two useless books of his (each on its fifth edition or so). The bookstore was owned and operated by the college, so I didn't even bother to complain.
I ran into a situation where a graded component of a course required buying the textbook by the lecturer. It involved an online testing service through a company owned by the lecturer. I raised a complaint with the university pointing out it was against policy along with the conflict of interest, was forced to transfer to a section led by another lecturer (same course, different textbook, considerably worse lecturer), and the university never bothered doing anything about it.
Same here. Most profs had their own condensed script that they just handed out to us. And if a topic was more complex it had a reference to well-known books that we could use if we were interested.
Or if we were really required to buy a book, it usually was like a really good 30$ book that we could use as reference for the whole degree.
It is a shame on US law enforcement. It is an example of how corrupt or bad the system is. There are so many petty crimes law enforecement don't bother to give a shit but when it comes to accessing knowledge (legal or illegal) ,they come in full force. It is just ridiculous on how much priority and impotance they put in these things compared to other crimes. It is because they are corrupted by the influence of the industries or money. Democracy at it's worst.
We had a single professor in first year in a UK university ask us to buy his book, but it was £10, no biggie. The rest of the material was always available online in .pdf, or pre-printed for you to collect
In my university in France (small engineering school), usually teachers would just give printed notes to the students. The few rare times where a textbook was required, the library bought one copy for each student so we could just borrow them.
It’s different in Europe, but you still need a book once in a while when doing a degree. And it’s insane to expect students to part with a three-figure number for a book.
I have physics, math and chemistry books from 30+ years ago that are not lacking at all in content. I truly do not understand why it is that, in the US, most science books aren't 100% free all the way from K through graduate school.
In fact, my kids have used my old books to help them with AP Physics in high school. They tell me they like the lower content of distracting color-filled "circus acts" (as they call it) and better explanations.
How much of the math, physics and chemistry has changed? I would guess, depending on stage of learning and subject, somewhere between 0% and 10% (with 10% possibly being an exaggeration). It is nothing less than ridiculous that students have to buy books on Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus, etc. for $60 or more.
This is the kind of thing that really gets me going about just how badly our system of education has derailed in some areas. Most school books, at a national level, should be freely available and used year over year, preferably in electronic form.
What is wrong with a, let's call it, federally publish set of books covering the sciences and other subjects? They could be evolved over time.
I know these things exist in various forms, we simply don't seem to lay down the law and use them. CK-12 used to be about books, now they seem to have expanded beyond that:
“Federally publishing” books seems like it would be left to the lowest bidder and the results would be terrible. I took a government class recently that used one of the mentioned open textbooks and it was great.
The private, for-profit results are already bad. The formatting is uniformally terrible, the writing is hit and miss. I like some of the open stuff as it is web formatted as opposed to paper formatting, which is the same motif that digitized textbooks use, which is both absurd and frustrating, not to mention DRM readers with shit functionality and bad or absent in-text linking and zero interactivity. It just paints "RENT SEEKING" all over the industry as a whole. However there are some publishers that make nice barebones texts and offer them in unlocked pdfs at economical rates, a real godsend.
The people I really appreciate are the pedagogues on YouTube who make world-class materials for "free". Shout out to Dennis Davis:
openstax is working on that too, for general college and AP subjects.
They're getting assigned in some courses, but I think most professors are happy assigning commercial textbooks, often knowing that they can be pirated and that most students will pirate them.
What's the justification for a professor to assign openstax Calculus instead of Stewart, for instance, other than to make a political statement?
It won't matter in another few years once teaching AIs, a hybrid of LLMs and knowledgebases and logical inference engines, can take the place of textbooks and teachers for non-specialized fields. That'll be able to handle almost all K-12 and lower level college subjects, and teach better than most human teachers. Traditional education may not matter by then, though, depending on what AI does to society.
Certainly. My two annoying experiences from college where buying the used text book for Biology which was a 2nd edition and about 5 years old for probably $80. Then a couple of years later I was in Calculus I and the syllabus listed Thomas' Calculus (12th Edition) as the book. It was brand new just released so no used copies. Bookstore had it for $220 and the 11th edition for much cheaper. I took the risk and bought the 11th edition. I mean after 11 editions how different could the 12th edition be?? On the first day of class noticed the person next to me has the 12th edition, I asked to see it to compare and to my horror it was completely different. Not wanting to get behind in class, I quickly found it on amazon for $140 and I had just got the student version of Prime for like $25 per year so got free 2 day shipping. Ultimately, never used the book for the calculus class. Teacher either gave us a printout of homework problems or wrote the problems on the board for us to copy. Auctioned it on Ebay after the class. The seller then filed a claim against me:
"Hello, I received this book today and it is definitely not in "like new" condition; the eBay condition definition for "like new" states that the "cover has no visible wear", but this textbook's cover is very worn on both front and back. The cover corners are bent inward, there are scuffs on the upper edges like it had been dragged upside down, and there's even a tear on the bottom of the back cover! It's incomprehensible how you could list this book as "like new," according to eBay's definitions, this book is closer to "Very Good", or even "Good" condition."
Note the "damage" they speak of came from amazon shipping it to me and it sliding around in the box. I responded:
"Sorry for the misrepresentation of the book. $71 is a very good price for the book. I was hoping to get above $110 for it. Because of the great deal you have gotten, I hesitate to offer a partial refund for the book. Will a partial refund be necessary? Otherwise, I will be more careful next time."
Lame.
The point about the biology book though, I just find it ironic that biology is always changing, but the Biology book was old and never updated while a math book seems to get re-written in a different permutation every two years.
Requiring an up to date textbook for math is just absurd. Pretty much anything you learn on an undergraduate math course hasn't changed for 100 years (and that's definitely true of Calculus I material).
My math profs warned us that, while the overall contents and concepts included were the same, the different editions of the textbook sometimes had chapters in a slightly different order and problems slightly rearranged. This meant it was possible to learn from any edition, but only the required edition was guaranteed to work for assigned problem sets.
Why didn't he just scan at least the assigned problem sets into a PDF? Do they require you to buy a brand new book just so the question numbers they pass match?
I'd bet publishers won't do additional print runs on those and might even recall copies not yet sold when the new edition comes out so availability of those will go down (and prices up) if they are made the desirable edition.
Really the prof should just make his own assignments (or rather have his underlings do it). At least that's how it works on this side of the pond. In any case, requiring additional purchases of educational material when students are already paying tuition is absurd.
I just talked to other kids and we pooled money to buy the book and then photocopy it. It was rampant piracy. I think we might have then either sold the book (likely) or returned it (unlikely) after photocopying it.
It taught me that there are limits to my ethics. Knowing full well that I am violating a social contract that many others are abiding by, I still did it. If I can act on this particular line, then it's just a matter of degree between me and those who more egregiously violate our shared rules.
After all, we had a massive advantage against kids who worked hard to afford the books. Even if they made $15/hr (outrageous), they would still have spent 10 hours on that book alone.
I'm not sure whether I agree or not, but as a reference point, Socrates comes to mind - should he have stolen off with Crito instead of taking the hemlock?
Shipping damage != like new. The ebay buyer was right to complain and that the damage came from Amazon and not you is irrelevant to the buyer. Would you be happy about undisclosed defects on a $71 purchase?
The entire textbook industry is run by cheap-jack mafiosi, and their "executives" should be reminded of this and shamed at every opportunity. Of course, I'm not claiming this would be effective since these people have no shame.
US textbook: In this 16th edition we improved all the problems and nothing else is new. By the way what means by "improved", it means that changing exercise 2.11 from "10x+2y" to "11x+2y".
> “It should be noted that when compiling statistics, we excluded all data related to the United States due to illegal arrest of two Russian citizens on suspicion of involvement in Z-Library,” the shadow library writes on Telegram.
Where does the "illegal arrest" part come from? If the arrest was illegal, that's a big deal. My assumption is that there was nothing illegal about the arrest per se, and calling it an illegal arrest is just a way of getting sympathy or trying to re-frame the situation. But, I could have missed something, so please let me know if this is a serious allegation.
"Public appreciation doesn't shield the site from prosecution" - serious question though, why not? Sure it infringes on copyright but I would argue at this point, research data should rightfully be classed as a public asset. It appears that's a popular opinion, based on all the piracy. So why don't we just classify it as such?
Something is legal if the society has decided it to be. That is distinct from merely being popular. I am arguing that the consensus opinion is very strongly in support of making publicly funded research also accessible to said public.
As a result, the question of whether such an action is "good" or "right" isn't really sufficient. Because the point isn't popularity, the point is that citizens can change their laws.
Theft is immoral because if I steal your physical property, I have denied you access to, and use of, that property.
If I copy your property, you still have access to, and use of, your property.
I would argue that is not immoral.
As a (recreational part-time), content creator myself, I would of course prefer it if people paid me so I didn’t have to work every day. But I’d rather that be on the basis of somebody wanting me to thrive, and showing their support, rather than me threatening them with legal action because they can’t prioritise giving me money over other demands in their life.
If you want a physical copy of some work, you need to pay for it. That’s moral. Digital copies? I think we’ve bought the myths of publishers and the content industry and it’s harming our education as a species.
I agree, theft is, devoid of any context, immoral.
However, I consider the privatisation of publically funded research to be (currently) legal theft.
Edit: I realise this was an indirect response to your comment, so I would also like to add that a meta-point I want to make is that we came to almost polar opposite conclusions despite having the same "morality" to a certain accuracy. Therefore, it could be argued that morality is not a sufficient measure for lawmaking.
How far do you extend this idea? A dollar diverted to a poor person is a dollar that can’t be used to grow humanity’s knowledge and capabilities. Is it immoral to be poor? A dollar spent on beer? Time spent having sex instead of researching the mysteries of the universe? How about low intelligence people reproducing with other low intelligence people to make low intelligence babies (“Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”) that will have to be fed and clothed and sheltered? Should people be allowed to be homeless? Be drug addicts?
In the grand scheme of things social programs have done way more harm to the advancement of knowledge than high textbook prices.
For everyone calling publishing a "racket": I'm about to publish a textbook for grad students in the social sciences with a major publisher. It will teach them the business side of social impact: planning, raising money, running a board, etc. It is all very badly needed, and I've spent 20 years of extreme hard work learning the details and another 5 years writing... this one book. My publisher, a top academic house, is giving me extensive editorial and layout help at no charge to me. We are going to charge $50, which even if I sell thousands of copies, will be pennies on the hour for everyone.... This is a rip-off?
You are the extreme exception to the rule. If you are as deep into academia as your experience might indicate then you should know that, and should be asking why other publishers and authors don’t play the game like you.
Many, many basic textbooks for required courses sell for hundreds, and use one time use codes for access to required content online. Meaning that the book is useless for future students without paying an additional exorbitant fee.
In other words, you aren’t the problem, and no one is pretending that you are.
Alternatively, how much would your book cost if it wasn’t sold to a captive audience buying on debt… pretty rare to see a $50 business book off campus. I normally see them at the airport for $19.99. Maybe just be happy that you are selling to a market where the person making the purchasing decision (the profesor) isn’t the one that has to pay for the goods.
What is the social impact of your business decisions?
Buddy -- it's your job. If you're TT this is just part of the hustle of an academic career. You get paid by your employer already, and your scope of work includes publications (which includes books). The publisher should be able to recoup their costs but it shouldn't be a profit center.
I think this is what professors/teachers tend to forget; get up in arms about your salary, don’t whine about your side hustle income. If you would be working for a corporate, it could well be that all that belongs to the company; it is about the subject of your job, it gets used at your job; it is your job, why do you believe you should be compensated extra for it?
I am from a time and country where syllabi were written by the professors and were free with the course (you paid a few cents for the printing/paper). Those were thick stacks of paper and they were free. Sure it could’ve been better; they could’ve been free as in speech, but at least they were free as in beer. That is your job and you already get paid for it.
I gonna say the exact same thing. Most of the time researchs are funded by either cooperate or government. Especially when you are receiving supports from the government, keeping the results behind a pay wall should be considered illegal.
This is very much college/program specific. My tenure track wife has tried with two different different universities to get tenure credit by writing an open access text book. In both cases (R1 programs) neither would recognize anything except 1st/2nd author publications in peer reviewed journals. They would not recognize textbooks.
Good for you. But I think you are over valuing your work and the impact it has. Is this going to revolutionize things for your students that so far have managed fine without this work? What about those students that go to different universities and may never see or learn of this? I doubt this work will have the impact you think it will have. There are a lot of academics publishing books. That kind of is what they do. It matters. But mostly only to a small audience.
Your publisher is involved because they don't have to do a lot of work or take a lot of risk. Editorial and layout work is a something they'll recover on the first few hundred copies and they are very good at that because that's their core business. It's a fixed cost. And since you bring the students, they'll have a strong guarantee those copies will get sold. Everything after that is profit. Most publishing deals leave paying the author as an after thought. They pay themselves first. And unless you are a best selling author, that means they pocket most of that 50$.
If you sell 1000 copies, that's 50000 dollars. That's basically the editing and layout cost more than covered. You may have spent years of your life writing and learning. But editing and typesetting that is a lot less billable hours than that. Weeks or months at best. Possibly just days.
So, from the publisher's point of view this is an amazing deal. You do most of the work, including bringing an customer base (i.e. your students for years to come), and they get most of the profit. That's why academic publishing is such a hot business.
And let's be fair. You are compensated by the institution you work for (presumably); probably pretty well even. Having a book with your name on it helps enhance your value and status. Especially if it sells modestly well. That's why you get the big money. Publishing and being good at that is part of the job as an academic. You are already being payed for that. This isn't you going above and beyond what you are supposed to be doing but you doing your job.
What you're doing is a public service and society would benefit from it being freely accessibile to everyone. Sounds like you should be compensate by the state.
So even in your extreme case, you don't expect to make even close to a reasonable amount of profit for your efforts.
How would it be so much worse for you to make no profit at all? $50 from the position of a student is a significant amount of money. In all likelihood, that is going to leave each student with a more significant financial impact than the profit you would be missing out on for not charging them: and it is multiplied to each student who buys the book.
--
The ultimate dilemma here is not whether or not you should be compensated. It's how. Whether you choose to charge for this book or not, this strategy is untenable.
Most people who are underpaid don’t want their income to fall further. Budgeting becomes challenging when fixed expenses take up too large a percentage. People often have a sense of how much they can personally sacrifice to accomplish something unremunerative.
> We are going to charge $50, which even if I sell thousands of copies, will be pennies on the hour for everyone.... This is a rip-off?
The part that is missing in the equation: How much value will this give to your readers? The answer is probably different for each individual reader of your book. For some those $50 might be a great investment and I certainly wish you and your audience that there are many such cases. But there is probably also a long tail of people who will not benefit enough to warrant the 50$ price tag - potentially because there's only parts of the book that are actually relevant to them or because they thought that the book answers some important questions that they had but it actually doesn't.
And then there's also the individual financial situation of the readers. Especially grad students are not exactly known for being rich. 50$ might be a lot of money to them. While it is possible that they will derive a value greater than 50$ from buying the book, it is far from guaranteed and can be a risky investment, especially when there are also other expensive books that they need to buy.
I get this feeling there's a better business model for you. After all it sounds like the market is saying this isn't really worth the effort.
My suggestion, and it's only as half baked as one can in 5 minutes of HN reading: give your book away for free to as many students as possible. Make it clear that you are running a community of social impact students, where networking opportunities will be provided. An online forum as well. You will be sure to have a number of industry people coming to you looking for the best students, which is something recruiters spend a lot of money on.
Someone did something similar in the quant finance space a few years ago, they built an online forum for QF students, got a lot of talking going, and then recruitment became a thing, IIRC one of the early users was a recruitment guy.
Another guy I know teaches a bunch of trading related classes, and he also gets to recommend people for things at fancy firms.
This guy is writing a more detailed than average technical book on specialized business planning for a fairly reasonable price of $50 per unit after half a decade spent writing it and some of you here are just piling the shit on, including claiming he's worse than bail bondsmen? What absurd hypocrisy.
Especially coming from commentators on a site where the bubble of privilege living is often as thick as a Star Trek shield, and many make hundreds of thousands per year working for some of the world's most money-grubbing, user-abusing, parasitic, pervasively spying, chronically mendacious tech companies in the world. I suggest you climb down from your sanctimonious pedestals for a little while.
You're a teacher, and your griping that you aren't getting bonus money for something that is part of the normal duties of teaching? Like, you're not even an adjunct here are you, you're tenure track... and the $200k/yr (average) isn't enough, you want to lock up this book of yours behind paywalls and DRM?
I think I have more sympathy for bail bondsmen than I do you.
You appear to be making a number of assumptions about the poster, and then holding them accountable for things that you have assumed. Unless they are all true, maybe you should hold back on judgement until you get confirmation of them?
If there was a way to sell your textbook that would yield more profits for you than thousands of copies at $50 per copy, and would also make it very affordable for students, would you do it?
UBI as an idea has merits but it's not the solution for this problem. The textbooks are outrageously overpriced because it is sold to a captive audience. Giving the captive audience more money just allows the publishers to price gouge even more. The solution is to make public domain or otherwise generously licensed books at least for well known subjects.
If you are paid to teach and/or research, you should also be paid to publish, and university presses should be dedicated to the free and public dissemination of that teaching (starting to happen, online courses being free to audit), and publishing artefacts (which is still actively resisted by journals and textbook publishers).
Isn’t it strange we can start to see the value of a course being made free to audit, but the books and papers that enhance the learning, are still protected like they’re holy relics that only rich, anointed classes can have access to…
As others said, most publishers do not have the high moral ground here. This is Valve's/Netflix's "piracy is a service problem" ethos taken to the opposite extreme.
If we put actual books aside... paying taxes, so that researchers get grant money and can write an article should be enough... having to pay to access an article about the research you already paid for is.. well.. stupid.
Quick tip: You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access. Nobody is making money off this.
Other than public scholars, academic books rarely make enough to even consider it minimum wage.
> You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access.
Most of us would send the final published version with proper formatting. It’s not even subversive, it’s something included in the non-commercial uses of the license agreements. Here’s Elsevier, but the others are similar: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright .
TL;DR: sending pdfs is perfectly ok; what they don’t want is uploading them to servers (which is perfectly ok morally but not so legally (yet)).
That would be useful if I could prove definitively that something is not useful for me, and will never be useful for me for the rest of my life. I would hate to owe back-taxes on something I scoffed at in a younger time.
Is that more from a general reluctance to pay for anyone else's benefit, in general, or more from the conviction that what's not useful to you can't possibly be good for anyone else either?
(Or something third or other option I'm missing right now?)
The third option is the one that would've stopped millions of people starving in China and Russia: centralising decision-making in government does not make for better decisions.
Better decisions for whom? As bad as governments can be, I can't think of a better way to make sure the less fortunate have at least some of their basic necessities.
What makes you believe that companies would be any better? I am astounded every time someone says something like this. Companies do not care about public good and are not your friends. They are not magically efficient structures run by super-human wizards. They are run by the same greedy psychopaths, except that you cannot vote them out.
To stay on the subject: what incentive would a private company have to sell their books at a reasonable price when they could just find a niche and seek rent? This is not hypothetical, it’s exactly what they are doing. What the fuck does this have to do with China?
Except you cannot vote them out? It's the other way round. You don't have to vote between two candidates, who have a thousand positions each. If a company is doing badly, you don't give it your money. That's far more powerful and precise feedback than political voting.
The incentive companies (unlike governments) have to lower prices is competition. If competition is not happening, then that needs fixing. If competition is happening, but the journals are providing enough value that no one can compete usefully, then I don't see what can fix that, as that doesn't sound broken.
As for China, if you read the comments you'll see someone broadened the scope of the conversation.
If our government contributed to famine alleviation in Russia, and that funneled money away from addressing the homeless crisis in San Francisco, how would that make you feel?
I have no idea what your comment means. Any question like this, while it might appear good in a tweet or a Marvel script, isn't actually very helpful in furthering discussion.
What I see talked way less is that the quality of new books, in light of this, is very bad. Most books out there that were published in the 21st century serve as business cards. Commoditizing the complement, they call it.