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Comment by phpisatrash | Hacker News Reader

Me and my colleagues will be affected by the end of Z library and co related projects.

Here in Brazil and for sure in most second and third world countries, people don't have money to spend in books.

You can argue that people can go to the library, but in most cases it's even expensive to take a bus or taxi even a Uber.

I'm a law student at an university in brazil. Law books are really expensive. Even though my university have a library, sometimes it doesn't have the books that the professors ask us to read.

Since I found z library I could have access to most of books that I needed.

I do know that the writers and publishers have costs and they need to make money, but I don't agree with the fact that we have to pay to have knowledge. It's more like if we don't have money, we can't have knowledge.

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I was looking for a book a while ago, it was something like $150 in the U.S. Out of curiosity, I looked up the price in other countries. It was 150 times the exchange rate.

150$ for a book is a lot of money even in the U.S. How do publishers expect other countries to pay the equivalent of 150$ (in local currency)? In many places $150 might be half the monthly salary or worse.

I understand publishers and authors need to get paid, especially the authors. It takes decades to gain expertise in difficult subjects and on top of it, one needs to be able to write well to create a good book. So yes, authors need to be compensated. But at the same time, their customer base in most cases are college kids. How do they expect them to pay? And how much of all that money goes to the authors anyway, who are the real experts vs the middlemen, the publishers?

The whole situation is just depressing.

>But at the same time, their customer base in most cases are college kids. How do they expect them to pay?

Student loans. When you flood an entire sector with money, it's only logical that prices go up.

> When you flood an entire sector with money, it's only logical that prices go up.

Is it? The costs haven't increased and the value of money hasn't decreased. The only "logic" here is "the publishers are assholes".

> the value of money hasn't decreased

This isn't true in the slightest, not sure why you think that.

And producers don't charge what it costs them, they charge what people will pay. And if you flood consumers with capital that they can use for specific types of purchases, then you reduce their price sensitivity and prices increase.

Why do you think college tuition has soared? All people on average are greedy, it's called being a rational self actor. But not everyone gets to charge insanely inflated prices year on year...they could if they would.

Poor phrasing on my part. The value of money hasn't changed as a result of the large amount of money students have because of loans, which is what the comment was citing as a reason. Obviously inflation exists, but I've never heard it linked in any significant way to student loans and it's not nearly as high as the increase in costs of textbooks that was being discussed.

I think you have it backwards. The supply of quality education hasn’t increased. Only the dollars chasing that supply have increased. Hence prices have gone up.

There is frequently a system where they sell an international version of the book for significantly lower cost. In order to prevent americans from simply purchasing the international version, it will often have substantial differences. So simply looking up the price of the same book may not show you what would typically be paid in another country.

The publishers originally had a great system, back before the internet was alive and kicking - they'd sell the textbook in the USA for $bigbux, and sell the exact same one in India for $cheapasfree - basic standard price segmentation, charge what the market can bear in each market.

But then the internet and cheap shipping appeared, and suddenly people in the USA realized they could get the same textbook by ordering it from someone in India, and pay $cheapasfree + $shipping.

And ever since the publishers have been trying to get back to the original promised land.

They could have lowered the price in the us enough to not make it worth getting a cheapo version which the quality is frequently worse. What many did instead was to lower the quality and sell at high prices, in many cases books have poor binding, poor print and editing and so on.

That would involve them making less money, which is a big, big no-no. The whole thing is incestously corrupt as all hell.

The situation gets worse when considering the near racketeering many publishers engage in. I had a couple of professors who assigned us their own $100 textbooks, which of course had a new edition every year and while they wouldn't rely on it much in class, they'd make sure to include at least one question in the exams about something only mentioned in the textbook (without stating that that would happen).

This kind of textbook "abuse" was pretty crazy in undergrad. In comparison, my graduate level professors all either used very old textbooks and didn't really care about the edition or outright used free textbooks.

Some of our professors would give us a "translation key" between new and old editions of textbooks, so we could work with used ones. For example, which exercises are assigned (in new editions they rearrange the exercises, for no apparent reason but to make the old editions obsolete...).

Not only that, but the last couple of times I actually ordered and paid for a book, it never actually arrived. I can get a refund, sure, but I really needed the books.

Use Library Genesis. It's also free and there is no download limit, and you have access to approximately the same books. https://libgen.is/

Yes, but it is hard to tell whether LG will stay up for long either. Their non-commercial nature makes it harder to hit them with heavy damages, arguably, but the underlying threat is the same, and there is no reason to think they are somehow protected from the same dynamic.

Download anything you need and then some. And spread your own writings widely and freely.

I need a clarification please: was Z-Library a commercial service?

To some extent, yes. The site limited downloads unless you were a paid user.

For more context see this recent HN-linked blog post:

http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html

Two questions: (1) there are torrent backups of LibGen, right?

(2) If (1) is true, then I can download a book with a magnet link, and they'd have to arrest hundreds or thousands of people all over the world to prevent it.

The UI for for finding and downloading a single file from a massive torrent is not very good in any torrent client I've used, but how hard of a problem is that really? Is there not tremendous value in solving it?

It's a big problem for extending the library. And torrenting is inherently less safe than downloading through a browser.

Why would torrenting be less safe?

because you may expose your ip to unintended peers. Not all people use VPNs.

If you are downloading from browser, you generally use server ip, so you don't expose your ip to peers. You only expose your ip to server.

LibGen is an invaluable resource, but is there reason to expect that Library Genesis will remain accessible for long if similar sites are under attack?

It's a decentralized system https://freeread.org/ipfs/

people were proactively mirroring it, someone also tried this for zlib here http://pilimi.org/zlib.html

The Z Library is still alive, as a TOR Hidden Service: http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52...

How long that remains the case with at least two of its principals arrested may be somewhat uncertain.

Any present operator(s) and site(s) would have to remain outside the reach of US or other Western jurisdiction and extradition treaties.

They were arrested on the 3rd, not today. It's just that the indictment was unsealed today.

My point remains.

On Tor, the location of the the servers and the identities of the operators are protected. No way for the feds to find them even if both are well within their jurisdiction. Unless the operators make a big mistake, the site should stay up and even if it goes down, there are plenty of other pirates around the world with full copies of the data that could replace the site.

The systems still must exist somewhere in physical space, connected to a public IP network.

They require maintainers to continue operating.

Bills must be paid.

At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed.

There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex:

<https://how.complexsystems.fail/>

I'm ... disappointed that it seems necessary to point this out explicitly.

How is that in any way conflicting with what I wrote? Of course the servers need maintenance and all of that - Tor is what allows the people doing that maintenance and funding to stay outside the reach of law enforcement even if they are on US soil.

That presumes the adminstrators exist, given that the site's two principals have been arrested. I refer you again to my initial reply: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647659>

Unless you're privy to other information.

> Any present operator(s) and site(s) would have to remain outside the reach of US or other Western jurisdiction and extradition treaties.

Maybe I misunderstood. I thought this was referring to the scenario where more administrators did exist and in such a scenario, they could live two blocks away from the FBI headquarters and it wouldn't make a difference.

There is also a ~28TB torrent with ~6M books within it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ymiwzs/zlibrar...

> I do know that the writers and publishers have costs and they need to make money, but I don't agree with the fact that we have to pay to have knowledge. It's more like if we don't have money, we can't have knowledge.

For all human history, access to knowledge requires wealth. Simple example — If I want to know how to fix a particular old refrigerator I bought second hand, I need to buy the manual.

That said, I enjoy the story of Jesus feeding hundreds of people with a few fish and a couple loaves of bread. I point out the story is also a parable. Jesus is somehow duplicating the fish and bread to feed the crowd. Isn’t this similar to knowledge? Should we not spread knowledge in a similar way if it’s of no cost to us? If you say “no, the author needs to be paid!” Then I ask, “is not the fisherman and baker missing out on profit from the sale of fish and bread?”

It always brings an interesting discussion around this topic. Fundamentally, I agree knowledge should be free. I post my blogs for free for this very reason. If I need to make money, I do work, sell products; etc.

Theoretically if Jesus duplicated fish and bread on an industrial scale, yeah, it would. Also, labor still needs to be put in to make the products, all piracy does is make it incredibly easy to make additional copies.

There’s a reason musicians have to constantly tour and the middle class of music has entirely degraded since the 90s

if the people Jesus fed with the duplicated fish and bread were too poor to afford buying any food, is that still lost sales?

If some student in Rwanda downloads a copy of some obscure Springer-Verlag text (I'm picking on SV because their practices with research publications are just so cynically rent-seeking it's easy to criticize them) that costs five times his annual income and probably isn't even available for sale in the country, is that really a lost sale?

You brought up music - I'm an amateur/trying to get to semi-pro musician myself, and my current "business model" is basically the Patreon approach - make something people love, let them give you money for it. I'm also an ardent fan of several bands (Surfer Blood being one very notable example) whose work I originally discovered via piracy. Since that first listen at age 16, I've bought digital copies of their work on Bandcamp and have bought tickets to see them live. If I like the work I will do my best to support the creator. I don't see why some massive record company needs to take a 50% cut so they can pay their "Managing Director of Artistic Innovation" his seven figure salary.

The argument "a pirated copy is a lost sale" is false in the general case, as my aforementioned examples demonstrate.

> You can argue that people can go to the library,

Where I grew up, my town library did not have any tech or programming books. Forget new jornal issues or cutting edge science books.

"Just go to the library" is such a first-world-and-megacity thing to say.

Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice.

I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences.

Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.

As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system.

It NEEDS to be consolidated.

I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best.

Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection.

I rarely go to the library for the town i actually live in because it is a forgotten wasteland. The library from the other town is just a few blocks away and they have done an excellent job keeping their library current and active.

In my town it would basically be you, the librarians and a few insects in the building, next town over is full on a regular basis. They also have programs and stay current, my town is dead and boring.

Why are we paying for libraries like this? All that duplicate staff and their associated pensions and benefits could and should have went to books, services for the public, etc.

I asked my town mayor once why the library building is so nice (granite flooring, floor to ceiling windows, it really is an attractive building inside and out) but yet the book collection is terrible.

The mayor at the time told me the library is a showpiece to attract new residents??? I guess they assume new residents don't actually step inside and discover the book collection is terrible?

Public libraries are a valuable asset, but need to be managed properly as well.

I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;)

It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really serving the richest or largest community, rendering the rest of the population as afterthoughts.

Like from an ROI perspective, it makes sense public libraries are terrible at serving the long tail/the part of the population who want to educate themselves to a high level. Patrons are more interested in popular fiction and children's books, so that's the most bang for the buck.

But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.

I wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.

They want to. The publishers won't sell to them/place ridiculous limitations on them. They're why a library has only so many 'copies' of a digital book to lend at once, why libraries won't have popular books as ebooks, etc.

You might find Archive.org’s Open Library project interesting then:

https://openlibrary.org/

> But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.

There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars.

Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albatross..

+1 for your comment on children books, this is why we went and it was incredibly valuable to us.

Given most of us are technical, we all know libraries are not a good resource for current technology books and this is not my issue. My concern is a city with a very tiny Chinese population has a large collection of Chinese books.. something is wrong.

PS - my ex was Chinese and loved it because she could go there and the books she wanted were always available, there are so few people in this city who can read them..

Obviously whomever is responsible for buying books invested heavily in foreign language books for some reason?

Sounds like your town has a government/mayor that really wants to look good to their peers (other municipal/small town mayors and city council members) rather than serve their population. Those types of buildings get features in all their stupid trade magazines, etc. And then the gov officials use them to hobnob with each other.

My bet on the Chinese books is that it's one of the librarians' special interests. It's not uncommon to have some % of the buying budget set aside for staff recs (that allows for some inclusion of things people may not have known they'd like), and if the system is small enough for one person to be doing all the buying, she might have overspent on her interests.

The cynical answer would be that the librarian wants to have the books so she can write an article on foreign language collection development and angle for a job elsewhere: Very few small town librarians grew up in their small towns and it's a very gentrified profession. She might be angling for a position at the VPL or TPL systems.

I live over on Vancouver Island and we have a regional library that serves the entire island and the coast.

It is fantastic! Each individual library is kind of small near me, but collectively they have a massive collection. Occasionally you have to wait a few days for a book to come from some remote location, but it is pretty rare for them to just not have something.

Library systems really should be managed at a larger level, they are much more powerful when networked.

i sometimes go to my local library (in a big European city). The computer science section has a lot of "for Dummies" books or titles that are very specific to a certain language version or framework (java 6, Symfony 3). Most of those can go straight to the trash. The many timeless books that exist are far and few between.

Check out #bookz on Undernet.

Also bookfinder.com which works all over the world to find the cheapest used copy (including shipping) to your country.

Also #ebooks on irchighway.net

It sucks, but search for used versions of those books. As long as you're willing to wait a week or two, you can often get used books internationally for <10 dollars.

Also ask your professors if they can share relevant parts of the books they use. Many countries outside the English-speaking world have partial copyright exemptions for education.

A last resort may be to ask professors whether they can apply for evaluation copies. Publishers often give free copies to educators so they can evaluate books for their curriculum. Sadly, it's mostly digital versions today.

In China it’s not even a matter of money. People already need VPN for accessing the free internet. Books are invaluable against censorship.

It's 2022, if people wanted to make their knowledge freely available, they do. You can't claim that knowledge is not shared enough, today, in an age when you have more access to knowledge than people in the past.

You aren't paying for knowledge, you are paying to get knowledge in this form, a form that you apparently find useful. It took many people work to put that together, and those people chose to put their work into a framework that you feel you can just bypass and ignore the laws around.

Even if you ignore money sometimes a book just isn't available to purchase.

what about older versions of the books? usually if you go back a couple versions it's much much cheaper.

Old law books?

Mostly correct, often useful.

I think that makes the point?

What could be more Brazilian than law students breaking the law in order to be able to understand the law?

Sounds like those specimens collectors from the 19th century that helped on the extinction of species (e.g. dodo bird, great auk) by collecting and embalming them for "preservation".

Yes, there used to be massive herds of law textbooks roaming under the canopies of the Amazon, but thanks to Z-library's irresponsible book-hunting and conservation methods they have become a very rare sight. The only remaining herds are in the Oxford University Press/Scholastic//Wiley/Houghton Mifflin textbook preserve located just outside of Brasilia.

In most countries downloading a book is not illegal. What might be illegal is to distribute copyrighted material. I say "might" because often distributing is not even illegal. Sending to friends and family without making money is usually not illegal. And how do you determine "friends"?

> And how do you determine "friends"?

This!!

This exact lawsuit took place in Canada where the supreme court ruruled that you don't necessarily need to know someone to "lend" to them.

They cited public libraries as an example of where books and video s are lent out free of charge and the librarian and the borrower are not "friends".

https://www.iposgoode.ca/2012/07/the-pentalogy-the-supreme-c...

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