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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit baffled why sci-hub has generated so much controversy, yet library genesis is much less frequently discussed afaics in the anglophone internet. It seems to me that sci-hub is doing something more easily defendable than libgen. (They're related right?). The scale of libgen's copyright-violating operation and vision is staggering, it's like a free amazon for books.

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It might be because 100% of the content on SciHub is owned by monopolistic copyright trolls that serve no purpose other than rent seeking. Libgen is diluted by content owned by businesses that perform some level of curation, pay authors, sell direct to consumers, compete with each other etc.

Those businesses have better things to do than piss off their customers and authors as they try to police the internet.

Even more cynically (and predicted by Max Headroom ~35 years ago) academic work has more potential to unlock economic value for the unwashed masses, so it needs to be better policed.

On top of it a student that really needs book and able to will buy. Their loss of sale through libgen must have been negligable so far for it to remain untouched.

The biggest reason is that academic publishing is much more viable to defend than novels. Book piracy has millions of “lost” customers, each representing a low amount of spend. Academic publishing has relatively few customers who pay a lot to access journals.

I use Library Genesis for a lot of academic books I definitely wouldn't buy—I need like one chapter or to take some notes, then have little further need for them, and they're usually $50-150 and still expensive or hard to find on the used market, so somewhat out of my worth-purchasing-for-convenience range—but would otherwise have to track them down on interlibrary loan then wait for them to show up.

Most academic book authors (of books that are a collection of articles) don't get paid for their work - or rather their payment is just 1-2 copies of the book. So you should not feel guilt for pirating them.

Libgen is not just "academic" books. Every single commercial textbook and programming book, for example, is on there. Many of those authors do in fact engage in those multiple-year-long writing projects in the expectation of remuneration. Do you think no O'Reilly author wants royalties? Some of these people are literally professional writers. I don't think they'd appreciate you informing the world that you don't have to "feel guilt for pirating them".

Scihub is completely different from Libgen in terms of ethics. No academic has ever written a manuscript for publication in a peer-reviewed journal because they were going to get paid for it. There is nothing whatsoever ethically problematic in accessing Elsevier's content on Scihub. Those journal articles should be free to the world, not least because the reasearch is often paid for by public funds.

Do not confuse what I'm saying. I am not saying that I think Libgen is a bad thing. I am saying it is a difficult area from a moral/ethical/economic point of view. Scihub and Libgen are the most fantastic libraries the world has ever known. Literally. It seems pretty clear that making them available to someone in rural Angola is a good thing to do. I work in a highly developed country and it's slightly less clear that the anarchy should extend to benefit me, but honestly I'm happy that it does.

OK but parent was tslking about the kind of books i m talking about - Not O’Reilly books but springer books that are usually unpaid collections of reviews. They are usually very expensive and bundled with journals in library subscriptions

Cool, yeah I know the sorts of books you mean. And agreed that the authors do not write those chapters in the expectation of royalties and agreed one shouldn't feel guilt in pirating them. But your post is at risk of being read out of context, as saying that libgen should be used without guilt, and there are people in this thread who seem almost to think that there are no ethical questions surrounding libgen, and who seem to think that libgen is ethically equivalent to scihub.

>There is nothing whatsoever ethically problematic in accessing Elsevier's content on Scihub. Those journal articles should be free to the world, not least because the reasearch is often paid for by public funds.

Just to add my 0.02$ as a soon-to-be-phd-dropout, I once downloaded my own paper from SciHub after I lost the stupid PDF and of course the publisher wouldn't let me get it for free. If anyone plans to assemble a torch and pitchfork mob, by all means let me know.

The people downvoting my question are very confused! It was a question; I'm not expressing an anti-scihub or anti-libgen viewpoint. It's absolutely unarguable the scale of the copyright violation is staggering! Absolutely every commercial technical book is free on libgen. I didn't say that was a bad thing. Never before in the history of humanity has such an incredible collection of technical books and journals been free to so many humans on the planet, each one just a few clicks, less than a minute away.

Hard to say. Voting behavior on here can be downright paradoxical at times. Downvoting is also easy to do accidentally due to the UI.

The sentiment behind the downvotes might be something like, "The first rule of libgen is you don't talk about libgen."

If I ran HN, I'd require a brief comment to be associated with each downvote, but then I'd do a lot of stuff differently.

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