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Comment by Xerox9213 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. The authors focused a lot on competing with market vs archival purposes. For me, and I reckon a lot of other people, I used libgen because I just want a PDF or epub that is not muddied with DRM or behind a university wall. Most of the books I download I already have a paper copy of, but want to be able to use it digitally. For me it’s all about convenience. I guess that would be pretty hard to measure.

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This is close to my use case as well. I mainly buy e-books these days, but they are often published as an afterthought[1] and not designed for readers – things like maths and plots get mangled in the process and vary from excellent to completely unreadable. So I want something closer to the physical book to look up the equations and visuals, but I don't want to have to go to the library[2] for each one. A PDF scan of the print book is very convenient.

[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.

> Sometimes they are literally an OCR of the print book! You can tell because of the symbol substitutions.

Not really. TEX for example does a lot of weird character substitution behind the scenes to mangle the layout.

how often does TEX substitute "rn" for "m" though?

Comma instead of subscript i is one of my pet peeves.

my friend in college bought texts books before the first semester when their parents took them to the book store. then a classmate showed them libgen and didn't buy any more text books except the one weird custom textbook by some professor.

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.

This pretty much mirrors my experience exactly, but these days I lean a lot more heavily on the Libby app for borrowing from my library which is amazing.

What’s the issue with Amazon/Kindle though, the fakes?

their de-facto monopoly status on basically all things books and increasingly on publishing, and of course their absolutely inane DRM.

libby is amazing, people are completely sleeping on it if you're not using it. free e-books!

Talking to some students, I'm told that people often freely pass a book on to the next semester's students.

it's actually very easy to measure. the audience here is close to the 1%, so your usecase is already discarded in the grand scheme with a 2% error margin when measuring behavior for the large population.

Yup hnews is not a good place to do market research for general population.

But it is a good place to get an insight into what could motivate enough technically minded (and connected) people to sustain such risky projects.

I used it to not have to pay.

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.

I use it to wade through the masses.

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.

I've done that a lot especially with books on raising a child, education etc... Most books are bad, I don't want to pay until I know the book is good.

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