Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge (2018) [pdf]
direct.mit.edu
direct.mit.edu
I buy 10 books per year off Amazon and the occasional Economist magazine. I am of course not paying for academic journal access or tons of academic books outside my field.
Download 10 ebooks on a subject, scroll through, read a few excerpts, and the one that I actually start reading, I buy from amazon or a local bookstore and actually read it.
Many books look great, but once you start reading them, are total garbage. This is in the field of IT literature though, so books tend to be very hit or miss, and quickly outdated.
[1] Sometimes they are literally an OCR of the print book! You can tell because of the symbol substitutions.
[2] Even most digital libraries I've tried are very inconvenient to "go to". Archive.org might be the exception.
Not really. TEX for example does a lot of weird character substitution behind the scenes to mangle the layout.
i guess they buy all their books now that they have a job, but also with generous use of used book stores and physical libraries.
oh and dont buy though amazon, especially kindle.
What’s the issue with Amazon/Kindle though, the fakes?
libby is amazing, people are completely sleeping on it if you're not using it. free e-books!
The author Balázs Bodó is an all around great guy with very refreshing research methods and an immensely broad portfolio of things he works on [1].
[1] https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html#Publica...
At the same time, it can be argued that writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money. The hard part is to get people to actually buy your book – it does not matter that you wrote the best book in the world if nobody gives you well deserved attention for it.
Bloggers suffer from the same problem, and it is not necessarily because their work is bad. The truth of the matter just is, nobody cares about quality information anymore (And I am guilty of this as well).
We want fast and summarized answers so we can move on to the important part: solving whatever concrete problem we are working on.
AI will probably delude the little remaining value of information even further, and at a point, nobody will manually write comprehensive information anymore. At least not unassisted by AI, and while the quality may suffer, we must also realize that we do not really need 100% accurate information. If we get a statistically significant amout of accurate AI provided information, then there is no need for anyone to write books anymore. It will be a complete unappreciated waste of their time, and nobody is going to buy them.
Even now that I am in a decent job, I still prefer not to buy books, instead relying on free sources on the internet (not piracy). If a given book/information is not available for free, then it is often not important enough for me to bother (note often – not always).
It is also a matter of prioritizing – reading a book takes me way too long, and the process is far-from comfortable due to my slow reading, and for that reason alone I tend to avoid reading entire books. It strikes me as an antiquated way to gain information even without AI. I may open a specific chapter of interest, but reading the entire thing is painfully tedious, and probably unnecessary.
And indeed, 'review' was the wrong word to use, but I appreciate you understanding what I meant
Sure they do. They happen to be able to pay for food, water, electricity, rent, tuition, transportation, pens, pencils, paper, etc just fine.
When I was at university (Oxford, UK, 2009), I bought about four key books, and spent well over 100GBP. I simply couldn't afford more. I had a student loan which covered tuition and some of my living costs, as well as a bursary from the university which covered some of my other living costs (but not all!).
What was annoying was that our library didn't have enough books for all the students. We'd all be assigned the same reading list for the week, and then have to race to the library to get the books before they were all gone.
Even the books like K&R C, Tanenbaum operating systems or CLRS / Skienna Algorithms will be north of 1000 INR in India.
Count 5 - 6 such books per semester, that's at least 5k - 10k INR. But for obscure books the price often goes to 5K for a single book. Let's say 10K INR.
Which is a significant amount, and for some students can exceed a month's living expenses for a semester.
So they're hesitant to spend that much. Often they end up with shittily written local books.
Now imagine you want to consult some book for specialist topics, like Windows internals or something, you will have to sell an organ.
Source: I was the Indian student.
Most of them could condense it's contents in a couple of chapters.
It would be great to have modular books, like Emacs manual. If sections where independent modules you could rearange the book or even create books from a series of sections from diferent books.
That way you could choose different outlines, maybe predefined by the author like, to create books tailed to your needs:
- General Ideas.
- General Ideas + observed cases
- Mixed outline (Concepts + Stories + Conclusions)
- All details about one topic
I think if you dive deeper in to more rigorous nonfiction books you'll find that less time is spent on the 'pop' side of popsci literature. Which might be where you're encountering that fluff.
$2 profit per book is perhaps a high figure that an author may recieve from the publisher. 2 x 3000 is $6000 for maybe months or years of work. And this would be a 'successful' author. It's not all JK Rowling out there ya know!
It's a huge help to have documents available immediately and not having to pay a small fortune for a single document that might prove irrelevant.
But you can get an epub on at least one of the shadow libraries :)
They are delightful to read on a ~13-inch e-reader.
Browsing figures or tables is usually a very bad experience. The figures are usually in low resolution. And the tables are sometime just pictures. Even if the publisher bothered to encode the table as a table, if it spans over one screen size, navigation becomes very hard. Not to mention symbols and formulas.
Historically, IP owners have tried various strategies to increase revenues by curtailing infringement. In the early 2000s, IP owners tried to extract revenue directly from pirates via honeypot torrents and ISP subpoenas. Since about 2010, IP owners have shifted towards a more passive approach where they prioritize infringement for commercial purposes only and largely leave piracy for personal consumption alone. It just didn't make sense to chase after teenagers and students who probably wouldn't have had the money to make a legit purchase anyway.
LLMs trained on huge corpuses that include pirated content like LibGen change everything. Now, these IP holders face an existential (or at least severe) threat to their business models in the form of AI generated content. At the very least, these IP holders missed out on a massive opportunity to extract some the wealth created by AIs by virtue of their laxity in going after easily available pirate content.
I'd expect to see a strong swing back towards very draconian enforcement of against even personal infringement: domestic ISP DNS blocking, perhaps even mandatory browser or operating system level blocking of infringement.
there's plenty of out of print books or that you won't find at specialized retailers but would find on lib-gen.