U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
* Amazon shut off bookdepository.com
* Amazon.com just won't ship many books here.
* Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.
* Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here.
* Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.
Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books.
The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.
I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.
Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home.
I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the book, I guess.
And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I pirated it, then decided to buy it.
It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just not to pay.
[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being...
Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the book and credits the ebook my account.
Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.
I have 4 library bookshelves (7 foot tall ones). And they're packed with books. *Bought* books.
But dealing with more current "online books" are a fraud. They 'sell' these books, but in actuality they're rentals due to DRM. I cant read them on Linux; I cant sell them; I cant read them on my phone; I can't print past their arbitrary print limits.
I have none of the same rights of these physical books.
So, yeah, I'll pirate.
[0] based on their actions it sure seems like this is the case.
You know that paper producers own land where they farm trees for pulp, right?
It's not like they're making deserts out there randomly chopping down trees.
They do make deserts out of forests when they clearcut. A lot of land is owned by others (governments, native tribes) and permits are used to extract the pulp
Because the cost of manufacturing a hardware eReader and keeping it charged doesn't have a corresponding carbon footprint.
"Maybe buy the author a coffee if you ever run into them"
Because that'll keep them solvent.
As others have said, you seem shockingly unaware that trees are GROWN specifically for making paper.
NO ONE is cutting down premium "old growth" forests to make paper..
Nice "virtue signal" on your part, too bad you did not spend 5 mins to learn where paper comes from first.
The physical copy exists to be a conversation piece on a shelf, to loan out, talk to friends about, not mind losing to a family member who's visiting, etc.
The digital copy exists to mark up, index, search, highlight, learn from, etc. If it's not on LibGen I'll buy it on Kobo and strip it in to my library using Obok DeDRM and an old ePaper reader I wouldn't want to use otherwise, and then buy a physical copy of it's something I'd want to share.
So often the books I loan out are "clean" and don't even have a wrinkle in the spine but sometimes I'll go through and dog-ear important passages or pencil-line particular parts. I've had friends assume I hadn't actually read the book until we pull out koreader and go over my highlights.
So much effort spent creating DRM systems that try to destroy the natural advantages of ebooks over paper books.
Ebooks and the internet could have ushered in a golden age of worldwide digital libraries unlimited by the location or quantity of physical paper books.
The current copyright and technical control regime may be good for some publishers and authors, but at what cost in terms of lost value to humanity as a whole?
The music and TV/film industries figured out how to get people to pay. The print industry can figure it out too.
> that would help much here.
You don't support changes that would help improve copyright policy?
here = my previous comment
Seems like it'd be a win for consumers, publishers, and bookstores all alike, and it doesn't seem too complicated to implement technically.
Even a QR code that provided a link that would allow an easy purchase for the ISBN would be great for publisher and the customer. It would, however, not be appealing to bookstores, since it just means the customer comes in, browses, and purchases it online, cutting out the bookstore that was playing a critical role in the process and cannibalizing its own sales.
You could create a bookstore-and-ISBN tuple that would also allow attribution without uniquely identifying each physical book. Probably improves privacy marginally (though it would provide a permanent indicator of which bookstore it was purchased from), but with the downside that it complicates things behind the scenes; what if one bookstore acquires another bookstore's inventory? And a bookstore ordering a new book would have to have its own individual print run.
> Print copies, wherever they are bought, come with free electronic versions in PDF, ePub and Kindle formats. With your print copy in hand, register it on the Manning site and you can download the digital versions from your account.
No affiliation, I’m just a long-time satisfied customer.
Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the entire book, but only a small section of it at a time is “descrambled” in the live view.
On more than one occasion I’ve used this to look up some specific topic, which was immediately viewable (and unblocked me on that problem), then gone on to purchase the book because I know it’s high quality and I’m likely to refer to it in the future for other reasons.
They also sell their eBooks as normal PDFs (no DRM).
I assume it’s a healthy combination of making high quality technical publications easy to acquire at a reasonable price. Similar to how digital movie and music piracy finally died down when that media became reasonably easy to acquire legally.
"forced"
You say that as if your hands are bound.
Creators have an intrinsic right to distribute their work as they see fit.
You do not have an intrinsic right to it.
If you don't like their terms, then your right is to not consume it. NOT to steal it.
If you decide to thieve, then that's your call.
Just don't pretend it's being "forced" upon you.
Not to mention, internet piracy is not thievery. The only thing in limited quantity is the silicon that enables it.
If piracy did not exist I would likely not buy these things in the first place, because the stupid restrictions mean I can't consume what I paid for. In that way, my hand is indeed forced.
Tell me, who is being cheated here?
Great! You can expect whatever you want. Just as the seller can set whatever terms and price they want.
> who is being cheated here?
Well, if the seller is clear as about the terms they are willing to sell for, and you just take it without paying, you are the one cheating.
You may have a moral right to cheat because you, I guess, have a right to have everyone offer the deal you expect. But I think it's taking it a bit far to say that not only are you going to take the content without paying, but you also want to feel cheated when doing so.
I think you glossed over the part where I pay for everything I pirate.
The publisher was willing to sell X for $Y. You took X + Z for $Y.
I get that you feel entitled to it, and I've certainly pirated stuff for convenience or financial reasons (as a starving college student, there was a lot of $500 - $5000 software that I really needed).
But it's disingenuous to play the victim when you're the one not honoring a seller's right to set the terms of sale. Pirate away, by all means, but spare us the nobility.
It’s also wild that the ebook is often as expensive as a hard copy.
The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst English and French speakers living here".
In Italy we'd say armiamoci e partite, "we'll get ammo and you'll go fight".
I can actually order a book on Amazon, to a drop shipper in the US, DHS it to Israel for less than the price of special ordering the book here, via צומת ספרים, assuming they even want to allow the special order.
Suffice it to say people don't try. There are two English book stores in the country (and a French one) that will go out of their way to work with you. They run into the geographic frustrations put in place by publishers. It's a mess.
Fuck it, they've failed to uphold their end of the bargain -- now I pirate, unless there is DRM-free content available for purchase.
Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can do is change the Billing Information on your account so that your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info. But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that have used this method). It should go through and purchase the book.
The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.
I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.
Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.
There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in the US?
In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another subscription?
There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"?
After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect people would do?
Canada subsidizes an entertainment industry that mainly produces things nobody wants to watch, so they're regulating companies to algorithmically force it on Canadians.
The amazing shows and movies that have come out of Canada in the last 20 years are popular because they're good... not because of some visibility issue with the rest of the fodder from companies that spend more on admin related to lucrative tax breaks and grants than they do actually producing content.
And since I don't like pirating, I just read books in the public domain.
Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never contributed additional books in their collection back to Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor.
But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?
Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from my library that it's switching to another system because Overdrive is going out of business.
If there was a service that caters to you for buying books, would you use the service?
But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared.
It's sickening to watch.
How nice can you really be if you sign up for, and continue to work within, such a awful institution?
If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to help people, and you're going to have to work with that if you ever want to fix the system.
Your point has some merit, but there's a big difference between being an engineer working with systems that can be misused and waking up every morning ready to crack people's skulls (especially since those people are usually impoverished, gender & sexual minorities, marginalized in some other way, etc) or outright murder them.
Yes, both people contribute to systemic violence in a way, but I would argue that there is a vast gulf between participating in society (which is mandatory) and being at the tip of the spear of violent repression.
Imagine having coworkers who routinely committed murder and received paid vacations for it.
That's how it was done prior to the 1800s.
Retain a small number of cops to deal with serious crimes (homicides, etc) and disarm them except in emergencies.
We also need to tackle criminal justice reform - ensure we have sufficient public defenders, ensure people have speedy access to trials, don't lock everyone in jail while awaiting trial, don't pressure people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit just so they can keep out of jail. Reprioritize minor offenses - who cares if someone has pot, why are we spending any time on it?
Sickening doesn't even begin to describe it.
The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and only gets worse.
What I can't stand is the disingenuous whitewashing of capitalism, which boils down to "don't trust your lying eyes" and "it's not Real Capitalism, which is actually cool and good". One can't have a productive discussion with these sorts of evangelists, much like one can't have a productive discussion with fanatical cryptocurrency fanboys who insist that ugly monkey JPEGs and The Blonkchain will magically create a perfect society, if only we just Do It Harder.
"Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. It prevents us from discussing actually-existing capitalism.
There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc...
Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
I argue that it's a fundamental defect, an architectural one, and it won't be solved with infinite patches and workarounds.
You can patch a defective design until it's somewhat functional, but it will never compare to a properly architected design. In the case of economics, we need to consciously choose what we want to incentivize based on how we want society to look and function.
>Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps.
This is the MAGA argument: "things were better in the old days". This is an appeal to false nostalgia and does not hold up to scrutiny. It also ignores the fact that every successful small company eventually becomes a big company.
Even in the days of small/pastoral/cottage capitalism there existed the same problems we have now, just more isolated and harder to root out because they were very numerous and too widely distributed. Abuse was very common, and any complaints were dismissed as "just the way things are" or countered with "then start your own business" or "get rich enough so you don't have to participate" or "you're gay/black/foreign so you should be thankful for a job" or simply "you deserve it because <X>". These things eventually improved, but every improvement was paid for in blood.
One worker at some 'ma and pa' business cannot effectively unionize, and has little bargaining power. In very small communities where everyone knew each other that worker may have more leverage by way of putting community relationships on the line (if they had some social power), but it never seemed to stop individual business owners from eventually buying up entire towns and running roughshod over the population.
Recent history and contemporary life is full of examples of this sort of thing — towns where everyone works at the same lumber mill or factory owned by That One Guy Who Lives In A Huge Mansion On The Hill. Now it's a Wal-Mart or Amazon fulfillment center owned by One Corporation that's distributed and faceless.
Companies are effectively dictatorships. Workers have little say in how a company is run, except in cases where they rebel against the system and go outside of it to redress their grievances.
Even then, this redress has never changed the fundamental relationship between worker and capitalist: the worker will always be a subject, because there is no democracy in the workplace.
It really amazes me how people can simultaneously support democracy and capitalism (dictatorship).
>The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
Even 'small capitalism' promotes severely undesirable incentives at its core, which appear at all levels of scaling. Can you provide an example of where it doesn't, or show that socialism/communism/whatever is just as bad?
Capitalism as a theory does promote undesirable incentives, that's why I wrote "it promotes the 'bad' parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc..." I think you also missed where I wrote "You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business." I thought I was implying it with 'ma and pa shops' but perhaps I should have used more exact numbers: capping the number of employees to 10 and then limiting the radius of business to 5 miles would make businesses so numerous, small, and presumably with a low enough startup cost that "disgruntled employees" could realistically strike it out on their own. Also, I only suggested the capping/geographical limiting as an idea/example. It's easy to imagine other ideas for discouraging the "bad" parts of capitalism, like forcing a wage ratio, e.g. the CEO cannot make more than 10 times what their average worker makes.
I never watch news so I cannot comment on anything topical. My thoughts are my own. If something I wrote has some sort of political connotations to current goings-on, then that's coincidence.
Personally, I dream of a Star Trek-ien utopia that promotes a pro-work culture with no money, no copyrights, no intellectual property, offers equal opportunity, and utilizes technology - like AI - to free folks to pursue a more meaningful existence. People should democratically vote on the services they want - food and shelter being the most obvious - and if there aren't enough volunteers for these services, then you conscript them. My thinking is if the military can conscript people to fight wars, then certainly you can conscript people to perform economic work; especially since it would be work that the majority democratically voted for! Everything we have today is because people built it; under the implementation I'm proposing we can still have everything - people just have to be willing to work for it in the absence of the "bad" parts of human nature. I'm not naïve enough to believe the implementation I'm describing would be immune to problems. At the end of the day, people have to "believe" in the system and want to make it work.
* You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others.
* You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason.
* You can't do it by buying a distribution license because some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those.
* You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending. Internet archive tried that.
The current situation today requires either paying perpetual, recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as is already the case at most local libraries.
When was the last time you wrote to your congresspersons about this overreach?
How big is the z library archive, anyway?
Edit: fixed my math
Also, there are plenty of drives with under $10/TB listed here some looking legit: https://diskprices.com/
So it is actually only $1200
You can also get dual-drive USB adapters for $20.
I very nearly bought a second one to replace an actual designed-for-NAS case which only has room for 8 HDD; the only reason I didn't is because that older Fractal Design case still works fine. It lives in the living room in the open without shame, and the Design 7 would look even better.
That probably is the real problem. Although you could plop them in some separated utility space like a garage.
Donation drive?
https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-raises-tens-of-thousands-...
My calculation off a Dell 2U was something like 195W idle - ~900 kWH / year. I'm in California so paying 50 cents per kWH, that would be ~$450 per year -- decided to scale back to a low power tower with huge disks. More upfront, but less annually. More disk drives (6tb vs 18tb) increased that to the point where I figured it was better to have fewer larger disks, even if they are pricier, because of the cost to run them.
You have identified the problem.
I did some rough estimates to see if the big disks were more cost effective than the 6tb ones and came to the conclusion small disks were worth it for me. The long term cost was pretty close though in the midwest where electricity is like 15 cents per kWh, giant disks would definitely be the better choice in CA.
It's easily within the means of relatively affluent professionals anywhere.
But they are logging that information in some database somewhere. So it's not a question if they care/ will enforce it now, but rather will they care or enforce it for the rest of eternity.
What people don't seem to understand about privacy is that once you give it away, it is gone forever. In some dystopian future where every American is assigned a social score, you pirating things in the early '00's may harm your ability to get a house loan.
Instead, we could be training LLMs on published scientific papers, textbooks, and high-quality reference materials, but we can't, because not only are they behind paywalls, they're behind thousands of individual paywalls.
No one has any idea what it's trained on. Also, with the advent of AutoGPT/llamaIndex, you can train it yourself on a massive stockpile of pirated data if you wanted.
There always is a mob of some kind trying to censor something.
I won’t make examples for obvious reasons.
Do the publishers not believe this? Or are they so old school they can't accept it?
LibGen acts more like an archive that's hosted on IPFS which eliminates a lot of the liability and can't realistically be taken down. You can only download the books from the mirrors LibGen links to and they're often just IP addresses so there's no DNS zone to seize.
It is possible that Libgen's proprietors are known to law enforcement but never stepped within reach of Western legal authorities. Certainly, had Z-Library's staff all stayed within Russia, they never would have been arrested.
Has anyone attempted to put together something like torrents of the top 100Gb/1TB/10Tb etc of LibGen data? My dream would be to mirror the whole thing, but that's well beyond my budget/administrative abilities.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...