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Comment by attilaberczik | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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

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.

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