U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view: knock out a hugely profitable business (textbook publishing) of you adversary while increasing your soft power by 100x due to the unpopularity of said industry.
There are surely loads of artists and independent technical authors who got screwed by it which I am not diminishing, but this is more than dwarfed by the benefit to the hundred of millions around the world especially from developing countries who can't afford to pay $100+ for a textbook on essential topic like organic chemistry or electrical engineering. In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to submit the book to the open domain.
You can read some other research here - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/2603....
(And I also have some very brief "scene" knowledge from circa 2010-2012, which confirms the fact, but you'll have to trust my word for it.)
It seems like a pretty good site to attack people from, for social reasons. It sits at a nice confluence of: technically unauthorized copying, but feels like not such a big deal. And getting academic papers can be a PITA. And the audience is probably self-selecting for folks who are doing interesting STEM stuff.
If I wanted to run JS in someone’s browser I don’t need a pdf to do it.
Scripting languages can help with certain exploits, but arent vulnerabilities in and of themselves.
Anyhow, theoretically possible but also kind of unlikely. Such attacks usually have a shortish shelf life so are used in more targeted fashion to prolong the exploits life and get the most value from it.
Good luck prosecuting the US company somewhere in say Philippines...
A lot of specialist scientific literature such as monographs only saw a single run of 300, 1000, or at best 3000 copies in the Soviet Union, and that’s it. If you’d missed it and didn’t have access to one of a handful of libraries that had it, tough luck. (To give an idea of what counts as specialist, the foremost textbook on general relativity, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, was translated into Russian in 1977 and had a single 3000-copy print run. The 1973 English original is still in print.)
Furthermore, when the Soviet Union fell, so for the most part did the publishing houses, and nobody knows where the offset printing films for the books went. So nobody can print Soviet books again without typesetting them from scratch, even those that weren’t rare. (Did you know that the new Russian edition of Gradshtein and Ryzhik’s special functions manual is technically a translation from Russian to English to Russian? Or so it says on the copyright page, anyway.)
In that environment, having widely available scans of books was absolutely vital; for those who teach students fresh out of high school who don’t necessarily know enough English, it still is. Today’s LibGen arose as an amalgamation of a number of those efforts from the early days of the Russian-speaking Internet.
One was maintained (unofficially) by people from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Another was mirrored (unofficially) by a Moscow-based particle physics institute that until several years ago originated a large part of the Russian presence at CERN. I’m sure other Russian-speaking research centers contributed just as much or more, I’m just not familliar with that part of the history.
As Russian-language scientific publishing stagnated, and subscriptions to English-language literature by and large did not materialize (what with them costing most of a typical money-starved institute’s budget), obtaining scanned and ebook versions of English-language literature from Western acquaintances became more important. People gradually unified under LibGen’s banner, and here we are.
And yes, none of this ever got government support, as far as I know.
It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.
What if you don’t have the money for the purchase? You’d never buy the thing if you couldn’t get it for free.
But at the same time, I think you can definitely say that it’s often like a lost sale.
> Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated
>> It very much is. => FALSE (my opinion)
>> Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. => TRUE (my opinion)
> I think you can definitely say that it’s often like a lost sale. => TRUE (my opinion)
Sorry for being a nuisance and getting caught up in semantics. I think we're mostly in agreement, my bad.
Not specialized scientific literature, I will never contribute to Springer's bottom line. But many books and films.
Sharing is marketing. Microsoft executed this beautifully under Gates, this is the reason №1 they are so dominant now.
Reviling sharing by relabelling it as pirating while still profiting from it on a different level is a good old strategy.
Sometimes the brand is enough, i.e. I know by experience that if a book is from Manning I can trust it, whereas if it's from Packt it's hit-or-miss-but-probably-miss. Self-published ones? 90% are worthless, 1% are gems with the rest on the verge. You can't really know this from reading a sample chapter or the ToC.
An ancedote is not the same as data.
(Legal) libraries had an effect of increasing sales, much to the surprise of everyone when they were first introduced. Its entirely possible that piracy could have too. Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows. I think the effects are non-obvious enough that actual studies are needed to know what the actual affect is.
Why elevate what is likely the work of a few committed private individuals to the level of some strategic state conspiracy?
Also, IRC channels with many thousands of textbooks have been around for decades (and have nothing to do with Russia)
Yes, Putin does all kind of shit, but this ... please, the national security interest card from copyright holders has been an evergreen.
I love that this perspective completely misses the point in the light of GenAI, the greatest appropriation of all human creation by large american tech companies, destroying untold commercialisation.
Can't have one discusson without the other.
People don’t understand how hard and expensive it is to legitimately access research articles if you’re from a developing poor country
The same companies pushing subscription models, restrictive e-book licensing, bundling, single-use codes, needless revisions, and anything else they can do to eliminate the first sale doctrine (and with it third party used textbook sales and rentals) and extract more money from students.
When I couldn’t get them from LibGen I’d get a slightly older revision of a textbook for pennies on the dollar.
The only time these leeches you mention got my money was with those codes required to do the homework.
If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)
Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
I’d assume is maximizing access to genpop
> Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
Probably because that would make it less accessible and more slow.
I'm surprised that didn't happen yet because DNS blocking is so ineffective. It's basically just akin to removing a business from the phone book or yellow pages.
I imagine the real reason is normies dont have tor installed.
There are ways to disguise traffic (onfuscated bridges) but those are always going to be an arms race.
Edit: But admittedly I do hang out in some unusual parking lots.
> They’re not on TOR because
Any downsides to being available on many decentralized overlay networks in addition to plain https, other than (compute/net/human) resources?
anna's has "donations for speed" and dark pattern hide the links to the fast external websites
That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.
Second class how? I open the tor browser, I paste the link, I go there.
The Tor Browser automatically detects and offers to redirect you there. No need to memorize the onion domain.
[1] https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor...
I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.
I believe the context here is the GGP's comment about using Tor Onion services. Are you using those to access libgen?
[0] http://libgenfrialc7tguyjywa36vtrdcplwpxaw43h6o63dmmwhvavo5r...
[1] http://library.lol/fiction/33618E71454C5165A39564CB861466AB
Via: <https://old.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/mqo0sg/tor_onion_po...>.
The sites are ON Tor. They were not exclusively on Tor for reasons others have stated: most people don't have Tor or know how to use it, though I suspect that situation may evolve.
And mostly irrelavent for clearnet in a world where everything is https.
Technologically? Maybe. Practically? I'm posting this while using uncensored Internet from within China, and not because I'm going out of my way to evade any blocking.
The GFW is more like the government put out an umbrella, but nothing is really forcing anyone to stand under it. Five steps and you're out. No doubt they could change that tomorrow if they so wished, but there are hurdles other than technical ones.
In my case I'm simply roaming using my German SIM-card, but plenty of VPNs would work too. They can detect and block these and do with certain ones, but for many they just... don't.
Interesting though, I'll ask around.
I think hosting in country outside of US jurisdiction (Russia?) and being accessed through VPN is more consumer friendly solution.
() that is, people that can't run a IPFS node or other advanced options due to their limited space/network/skills/money.
Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)
To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.
- It used to operate very publicly, but now it is just as opaque black box - no one know who is behind it, operators barely communicate with the community.
- It used to be public enemy #1 of the (copyright-) world. Today it is barely a sidenote of the yearly notorious market report. Though the fight against pirate sites is stronger than ever, TPB seems to be silently tolerated.
People with certain mindset might wonder why that is.
Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there's no "meta-coordination" built in to the protocol. It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they're online).
It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.
The best effort I've seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.
Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.
https://annas-archive.org/blog/putting-5,998,794-books-on-ip...
Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I'm going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that's not all that accessible to "regular people" anymore.
(I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
Some torrents add another ASCII advert like Amiga BBS's used to add back in the old day which used to result in dupes?.
Amazing that book piracy is a thing, I guess it's pretty big on this board as the majority of users on this board would be considered 'bookish' and know that a lot of the (technical) books that would like are not available at the local library.
In theory, you could extend torrent clients to support archiving some subset of the files. You just tell it to keep around 100 GB of files in a 10 TB torrent. Since the client knows the status of each chunk in the swarm, it can make smart decisions about which chunks to download and seed. Clients already let to set preferences to seed the "least-seeded" chunks. So this isn't so far fetched.
The big problem with this is that it lets you work only with a fixed archive. Torrent files can't be mutated after they are created. So you'd be able to get people to archive a fixed version of a shadow library, but not an evolving one.
In practice, this should be fine enough. If we had high assurance that all the books added to the library before 2022 (or something) were copied in 50 machines, that's quite useful.
Being able to layer deltas on top would be amazing - you could evolve the collection as new books are added.
I don't know if it's strictly desirable to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks, because that provides an avenue for bad actors to attack that assignment (e.g. by e.g. claiming to have a block to drive peers away, but never actually serving it).
It would be possible to have the swarm behave cooperatively based on heuristics, though. Your client gets a copy of what peers have what chunks, so it has enough information to make its own decision on what chunks need to be mirrored the most. A sufficiently clever algorithm would get pretty close to a centralized cooperation server.
Iirc, some extant torrent clients have similar features where they download the "hot" chunks first (the chunks with the most leechers, for private tracker ratios). I suspect the only reason an "archive/sparse" variant of that where it only downloads poorly mirroed chunks doesn't exist is because it's useless for the normal "download a file" use case. Sparse chunks of a file are basically useless outside of archival.
This might be a place where “proof of x” concepts from crypto land work.
But we don’t need to go all the way to the maximal solution for it to be practical.
1. More often or not, I am in search of a single piece of information. Buying hundreds of pages of writing is not economical for this goal
2. Sometimes, I own the physical copy and want to search it. Buying a digital copy is a waste when I already own the physical one
3. Occasionally, the content is available to me via my library, but in the case of point 1, traveling all the ways is a waste of time. Some people don’t have access to a library.
4. Sometimes, I want to decide between two books, or see if the book has what I want before I purchase it.
5. A few times, the content I want disappeared, but there it is at the shadow library.
There are lots of us, so don't be afraid to say it loud. Intellectual Property doesn't exist and copyright as currently implemented is unjust, antisocial, and harmful.
Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on information, on bits, on numbers. And everybody intuitively understands the absurdity of it. Infringement happens every day at massive scales, people do not even realize they are infringing, it is natural to them.
Being able to read old magazines of Byte magazine and the tutorials in Amiga Format and Cu Amiga are great as well. But those articles in early Byte magazine were of an amazing quality.
- Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar.
It would be much easier if one side was the authors. The problem is it's "rights holders".
As a frequent reader on RoyalRoad and occasional Patreon supporter of one or the other author I am well aware that many authors indeed to have a problem of theft of their stories.
Examples:
- https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/7183/crashed-into-fantasy/...
- https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/33922/ashes-of-empires/cha...
I doubt though that any of those law suits are meant to protect those little guys.
In addition, I think we need something else. Digital copying is so very different from theft of tangible objects that I think society as a whole would be much better off if we manage to come up with a different method to pay authors, without the huge amount of effort and infrastructure to artificially limit distribution.
I mean, it kind of works for music? Far from ideal, but at least it's something. Okay, it works a tiny bit better. On second thought, maybe it "works" when I use a radio Yerevan kind of definition...
In fact, I even worry a bit about what will happen to Linux when Torvalds finally passes away, and for sure Linux depends on him much less so than all those pirate resources on the people who maintain them.
Piracy of books in particular has been around since the 17th century btw, if that helps to convey why I'm not worried.
i coin a protocol in 2005 and in 2007 i•ve combined 6 torrents into one archive. Clearly Im an upstanding member of the organization.
Eventually even the top tasks can be strictly defined and frozen in time.
There you go, ruining my evening again. Hope you're happy, making an old man cry.
I don't know what DHTs it's pulling from, but BitMagnet lets me find LOTS of cool, obscure stuff.
The most frustrating is that store, even searching for the most popular books yields weird, useless results for me.
Quite a good service actually, called Libby. There are obviously ways to remove the DRM and make just a normal ePub but I’d quite like not to have to do that if I don’t have to.
This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.
You can't put a face or even handle on yourself, ideally. But that's all social media is these days.
---
But that is a good point. It's doubtful that the intelligence community would care too much about people downloading books in the TOR Network. Or if they did get an interest in that, it works have to be a very special book, indeed.
The same applies to Tor, for now.
EDIT: btw, I tried to use anna's archive a few times and couldn't download the files. Something always broke before it finished. Definitely a way less good experience compared to libgen.
Unlike this Libgen court case, they likely identified the owner, Maria Dolores Anasztasia Matienzo. It's not just another court case against anonymous unidentified persons. They found her due to her poor opsec (nickname was anarchivist), so it may shut down soon.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68157923/oclc-online-co...
Weirdly, the lawsuit is not from book publishers, but by the owners of WorldCat, a book metadata database she scraped and uploaded.
1. The name, Anna's - Anasztasia.
2. That Anasztasia has the nickname Anarchivist and is a self-described archivist.
3. That Anasztasia had a GitHub WorldCat scraping project.
Perhaps there were more things I forgot. Her personal blog writing reads very similar to the AA blog to me too. I unfortunately think they've found the AA owner.
Thankfully Anna's Archive is fully open-source, so it'll likely live past this civil case in some way.
"We don't know who did it but when found they are liable for X€ of damage"
Apparently the answer is that you can sue a web site and serve the Internet service provider and whoever registered the domain name.
I would imagine that if there's an anonymizer for the domain they are accepting responsibility for delivering such subpoenas. (I didn't see that started as fact.)
Googling turned up that this happens a lot in hit and run cases. I didn't go down that rabbit hole.
Is it because this is an injunction rather than the outcome of a trial? But I thought an injunction could only stop behavior, not order a fine.
Or does it have something to do with it being a corporation rather than a person? Or with being a (presumably) foreign corporation?
> n the order, McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer domains to publishers' control or "otherwise implement technical measures, such as holding, suspending, or canceling the domain name to ensure the domain names cannot be used" for further copyright infringement.
On the balance though, ya, shut it down.
What is the evidence?
https://www.unesco.org/en/right-information
*But only for rich people in first world countries who can afford spending hundreds of dollars on overpriced textbooks.
Narrator: and LibGen’s anonymous operators still didn’t respond
The domain name injunction is interesting, but they want IPFS gateways to comply too, thats odd
but a direct IPFS hash would work, are there any browser extensions that resolve ipfs:// URIs?
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. You can sue a person or corporation. (But e.g. you can't sue ""Antifa"" because that is neither.)
2. Incorporation involves named officers.
What am I missing?
I've recently stopped buying books from publishers that engage in this shitfuckery (Elsevier, Springer, etc). This frees almost 1000 EUR/year that I'd love to steer towards libgen, sci-hub and similar initiatives. But not for paying these stupid fines, of course.
Not much to do about the cost though. Textbooks specifically can charge this much because the target is education, not the layman.
Fortunately, a friend showed me how to purchase identical-edition textbooks from Indian/SriLankan publishers — written in English and with valid online access codes. Including shipping, textbooks from this source were identical material (on cheaper paper) but only cost 20% of US publisher prices.
On recollection, I'm sure this was somehow illegal/contraband; but looking at it it decades later it still feels like academia/publishers are robbing the majority of students with their prices (just like healthcare... taxes... etc.).
Hilarious and sad typo. What a clown world we're living in, where the worthless AI-generated virtue-signaling drivel from LinkedIn is allowed to continue existing, but this vast trove of knowledge that's broadly useful for humanity is forced into the shadows.
Books should be free for all, and we should encourage and educate people to donate back the value they received from them
The real question is: are you willing to build a community around accepting it? Otherwise it's just numbers.
Not saying I agree or disagree one way or another, but that's really probably the reality.
Quite the opposite: as with all piracy, the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate. (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
If books weren't sold for profit, we would have better books, only released less often. Back then, we didn't have so many yearly releases, and I honestly think that isn't needed.
Why would we have better books you say? Similar to how open source projects draw very good programmers. Some do it for prestige, and some weird ones do it for the joy o f doing true quality work. IMHO
you take a few interesting leaps in a failed attempt of.... trying to turn opinion into fact?
> the ones who pirate stuff are also the ones who spend the most money buying the stuff they pirate.
Uhhh, wot??
Please provide ANY source for this. Really. Like even if it's a blog you wrote and was a creative writing experiment for you, publish it. Just so I can mock you.
> (For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience, but it was also true of DVD, video games, music CDs etc. but these people wouldn't have spent more money if piracy was impossible).
So at this point, I hope it's clear that you are a bit silly. But...
> For books there's the obvious reason that paper is still by far the best reading experience
This level of intellectual dishonest is horrible, especially if it's legitimate.
I'm sorry that I called you intellectually dishonest and you got mad, but it's the truth.
The alternative would be to make a request for my university library to get the book, but I don't know how long that would take if it would happen at all.
Would the world be a better place if I stuck to studying only the books in local libraries and what I can personally afford? I personally don't think so.
Also long term, but it'd kill like, 5 birds with one stone.
Isn't that supposed to be the publisher's job? They don't. Just ask the authors.
Yes, but most researchers are compensated by either the state, universities or companies hoping to profit of their research. Little high-level research is done for the fun of it.
(In fairness that fee did nominally grant access to read other papers by them as well, but the credentials they sent out didn't let me log in and I didn't bother contacting them to resolve it)
[0]: https://monoskop.org
[1]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/
[2]: https://computerhistory.org/collections/
[3]: https://oapen.org/
'Stealing' from a company with 2B in profit (much from publicly funded research), LibGen is looking a lot like Robin Hood to Elsevier's Prince John.
Publishers offer support and printing, but ultimately an author needs a publisher to spread reach (i won't say "make money", because authors sure won't make much). Becsuse it's all about being loud and publishers have resources to be loud. Much better odds compared to a grassroots community paying a fair price when the author is ready to release.
It's not fair, but it makes sense. And sure the most well known art is not the best art. But a place like this should know the best tech is rarely the most popular product.
Most books make very very little income for the author. So it is already the case.
It's a tragedy of the commons. Not a commons of the product tho, of the ability to keep the creations flowing.
Can you imagine what the automobile market would look like if you couldn't trade-in or sell your car and just had to trash it? New cars sales would plummet.
We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.
Or are there people who draw lines and say that one type of work product should always be free while it is OK to charge for another?
For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact
Corporatism is going to be the death of art, because we've normalized the idea that art is an ancillary function of some business project that first and foremost wants to generate profit.
Look, no artistic endeavor needs to make a billion dollars. Even when something does take a billion dollars in revenue, none of it goes to the artists anyway! Music labels and movie studios and book publishers are infamous for creative accounting and bogus contracts and outright lies to fuck over almost every person that actually contributed to the art. They're worse than politicians. It's all there to funnel even more money to people who are already rich. If you put artists on basic income you're not paying them any less, you're not losing anything, 99.9% of them come out ahead of where they would've been if they'd sold their work for money. Maybe add a couple more nines to that list. For every multimillionaire movie star or generation-defining author there are literally hundreds of thousands of artists just barely scraping by. Capitalist art only benefits the leeches.
If it is not enough to live on, then only the independently wealthy can do art, which goes against the exact goal you stated.
Also the idea that a significant UBI would lead to people just coasting seems patently false. Every bit of evidence shows that when given the opportunity the majority of individuals are driven to improve the quality of their lives; and also, that quality is measured in relative and not absolute terms.
Or alternately, millions of people will cease busy work which adds no value - and engage in genuinely productive tasks instead. Caring for their families, locally growing food, building collaboratively, teaching and learning form one another. We only reach for succour and addiction when dispirited and alienated. Graeber was far too conservative in his definition of bullshit jobs. The vast mass of us now work in the production of bureaucratic services so far removed from an actual good as to be incalculable. Our work is bullshit, or worse - actively destructive, and we know it.
Most people want more than this and will work for it. But accepting it as a form of sacrifice to achieve your other goals is hardly a problem -- and then people can create their art or start their own business with sweat equity before it generates any revenue etc.
Artists would then get the UBI and whatever they get in terms of patronage, donations, art sales, etc. Neither of which might be enough to live a middle class life on its own, but both together makes it happen. And then the people who make a go of it but never manage to produce "art" anybody cares enough to support at all never make it out of the tenement and retain that incentive to do better or find a different path in life.
And importantly, they continue to have their basics covered while they do that. Part of the reason most people end up stuck in bullshit jobs is trying for something better is too risky.
Maybe this is not the topic you were going for but this triggers me because I've long wondered how to do pricing fairly in general. If you're a monopolist or in a highly competitive market, what strategy could you use regardless to arrive at a fair price? I think the answer is cost + a little bonus because nothing else really works. If I had to pay the value it brings me for everything in life... what are my glasses worth, half my salary? The work computer (as an IT person) is maybe three quarters of my salary? That already does not add up and I still haven't paid for the food I need or my office chair
The person who makes it knows the cost price and needs to set a price for money to work, I think. Which is not to say that donations can't work, you can always feel free to make an exception and give the author a good day, but it wouldn't work as a general payment model I don't think
If you're talking about people that think payment should be optional but encouraged, then your "There is no pricing that would satisfy the person" "it doesn't matter" argument is incorrect. It does matter to those people and you can have a productive discussion about the correct amount.
> In October 2017, the company was acquired by Ziff Davis through its IGN Entertainment subsidiary.
Tell me, what price should your parents have charged you for teaching you to tie your shoes? To cook? To clean? Get back to me when the cost of digital reproduction requires factories, and trucking fleets, and paper mills. Oh wait... It doesn't. It requires transliteration to the written word, document layout, and maybe a little marketing so the world knows it's there.
If the paper book can be delivered for $8.99, there is no excuse for the ebook to be $8.99 per reader en perpetuity. Even Thomas Jefferson bloody understood that concept 200 years ago. One who lights their own candle off of another's leaves the one who was lit off of none the worse. So to with knowledge. The owners of industrial printing presses are just terrified of the possibility of the dawn of their own irrelevance. So they dump what money they get in creating artificial information asymmetries to exploit tor profit. And therein lay the root of all evil.
Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.
Most books that are in the public domain today (hence with no legal hindrances whatsoever) are still not meaningfully free or available to all. Copyright turns out to be simply a minor issue when viewed in a larger perspective; actually making works meaningfully available whenever this can be done free of legal issues is actually a lot more important. Note that this encompasses discovery and findability (e.g. through detailed cataloging) as well as practical access (e.g. through availability in a variety of open formats). It's a hard problem and one that's far from being comprehensively addressed.
Also, interesting username.
yes certainly, thank your local library.. your country has them?
> we should encourage and educate people
yes certainly, but many people have had income from a book economy. Some certain books of great quality might increase in price. How can people wish for no-book economy so quickly?
However the only thing I want from publishers is DRM-free e-books (same for music). If you offer a way for me to actually own the digital property I'm buying, I'm going to buy it. If you make it hard or impossible to transfer between my devices, or share with my wife and kids (i.e. how physical media works), you're not getting my money and I'll find another way to get the book.
Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.
LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.
I wonder if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Meta.ai have spent much time looking at LibGen…
The apps are a bit janky, but they're there.
Long live libgen - one of my favourite places on the ‘net.
As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.
Yes
> Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.
It's much worse both in the content availability and ease of use, so not a bit different
I also wonder if google is using their own dataset from books.google.com .
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/meta-admits-use-of-pirated-book-dat...
> LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.
The only reason for copyright to exist in the first place is to further the progress of humanity. If it doesn't do that or even hinders it (and I tend to agree that it does) we should get rid of it.
But the key words are "a better world". I don't think this is really possible in, uh, this world. Imagining a world like that is a bit like a soviet utopian-fantasy book about the world of established communism. "Sounds Good, Doesn't Work".
To be fair, though, if "the government" you are talking about is the one of the USA, I thinks loc.gov is pretty great stuff. I mean, it's pretty shit compared to what somebody like "the Anna" could do with this amount of resources, and it isn't really made in a way to make researching, copying and saving stuff locally easy, but still, I'd love if every country maintained something like that (at least). Lots of relatively rare interesting stuff out there.
https://software.annas-archive.se/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Why are we not slipping onion support into Hyphanet's opennet and just uploading library genesis to that?
digital assets which don't suck under capitalism require real innovation from the government or, if that doesn't work, the people themselves
So training is legal and reading is illegal.
Power is the final crux here.
But money has historically been more effective at producing or controlling power than the other way around.
Money/gold is a proxy in the current social system.
One ended up in jail commiting suicide for scraping freely licensed JSTOR articles.
The other is considered hero for scraping JSTOR articles and every other article ever.
Lesson is dont waste peoples time with things that dont make money. More money it makes the safer you are.
Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know, but it is certainly a different point on the continuum than traditional libraries.
The actual current status-quo is. Despite the most of the worthy books being available on pirate websites, people still buy books. Publishers still are not bankrupt. Even independent individuals post "I wrote a book" here every now and then, link to DRM-free purchase pages and seem happy.
I personally spent many hundreds dollars buying DRM-free ebooks on GumRoad and HumbleBundle (despite most of them being on LibGen!). I also bought numerous hardcover paper books after reading their pirated ebook versions.
Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection of printed literature on STEM topics, the books have published not for the sake of earning money, also they used to have free libraries among all the villages. This is the closest example I can give and BTW those Russian books are freely published on Russian torrent trackers.
> A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations
Even without any further clarification the search among existing countries is going to return 0 results.
Meanwhile they still have flibusta.is where almost any book ever published in Russian can be downloaded one-click as structured XML (FB2) and the maintainer is dying of brain cancer right now after having paid for the server to run for some more weeks. Russian is among the top languages in terms of the amount of books published in it. Apparently we are witnessing two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time.
See https://wiki.mhut.org/distribution:torrents
I just hope enough capable people will download everything to be able to create mirrors again someday. Perhaps the darknet can turn out a better place.
In my opinion, this seems like a particularly stupid risk to take as a pirate site. Ad networks would be in a prime position to dox all your users and, were the publishers so inclined, they could easily get that data and target your individual users for legal harassment.
Are the costs of running Libgen seriously that high that they have to defray them with advertising specifically?
First, while Google aggregates lots of data for analytics and advertising, and if subpoenaed may be able to say that a given user visited a given pirate site, they only know the user opened pages -- not that they clicked a download link or successfully downloaded an ebook, because the ebook file itself contains no Google advertising.
It's not illegal to do a search on a pirate site. The only illegal part is the downloading, and ad networks don't have any record of that part.
Just because you like what someone is doing in principle doesn't mean they're good people doing it for good reasons.
Money is rarely an incentive for writing a textbook, but it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.
Given that, I don't feel too much guilt 'borrowing' from alternate sources.
Publishers give you no lending rights on physical books; legislation and common law give you rights to lend that stem from the first-sale doctrine where I live. Push your legislators (or courts) to establish first-sale doctrine over digital content and there you go.
Source: worked for a plaintiff publisher in this case. Think Pearson, Cengage, and MHE all publish financials also.
Whenever possible, I try to but stuff from the authors & creators directly. I haven't been in the market for textbooks in a long time, but even 20 years ago it was a ripoff, and it seems to have only gotten worse.
Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.
The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.
I suppose my snark was more in reference to the textbook market, which seems to be the primary focus of Libgen. Academic textbooks seem primarily to be a way to extract some student loan money into publishers' pockets, with plenty of obvious typos, problems that can't be completed, and new editions every year that simply change the order of chapters without fixing any of those issues.
When I was a student, in several of my technical classes, after every test we'd spend a class correcting the answers provided by the textbook that disagreed with more authoritative sources. Spending $100 for a book that was only half right when I could have bought a real technical book for $40 has made me cynical about the whole industry.
Anyway, I've got a new list of publishers I'll never publish with, nor use anything they publish as required reading for a class I teach.
Why? You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.
> it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
There are better ways of supporting work you find important than the parasitic publishing industry and copyright.
> maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.
Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
Who do you think was feeding the monks?
You may think this specific example, which you seem to think resembles the current publishing industry, negates my overall point, but... not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_books#Book_culture
> The authors of antiquity had no rights concerning their published works; there were neither authors' nor publishing rights. Anyone could have a text recopied, and even alter its contents. Scribes earned money and authors earned mostly glory unless a patron provided cash; a book made its author famous. This followed the traditional concept of the culture: an author stuck to several models, which he imitated and attempted to improve. The status of the author was not regarded as absolutely personal.
We are living in the most productive time ever for the book industry, I think comparing the current industry to the past when we produce several orders of magnitude more works that many people highly value is nonsensical.
Having the maximum number of books possible is not really something I would consider a success metric. Or do you think the endless stream of AI-generated books happening right now is a good thing? Also, publishers and copyright are not the only way to monetize your work.
> Authors could give their books for free if they really felt that it was important for their book to be free.
Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
Obviously I think that the combination of value and quantity of books today is much higher in the past, you don't need to nitpick my phrasing. Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
> Can they? Or does the publisher control that right? That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free. They might not have an editor or translator, but those things cost money. But most authors like money and since most books loose publishers money its not like the author is loosing out.
> That being said, some of the best technical books/works I've read were free.
I'm glad you liked them. The best fiction works I read I paid for, and trust me I've read a lot of free fiction works.
It's not obvious at all when all you mentioned was quantity (two times in a row). And I think the reason that was all you mentioned is because that's the only 'obvious' increased metric you have. Not to mention, there are many other things that are different now, so chalking it all up to copyright and publishers is illogical.
> Additionally, the book industry has been in its new peak of written work since before AI became good in 2020.
Again, you're making claims about 'peak' and 'book health', etc. without actually defining what that means... is it supposed to be 'obvious'?
> Its 2024. An author doesn't need a publisher outside of academia if they want to publish a book for free.
That entirely depends on the situation.
Does it though? The current deluge of books is mainly due to the easy of creating them and getting them to readers. That is, thank computers not copyright.
Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then? I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.
I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing, and it doesn't seem like it's doing so great:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
I'm not saying the publishing industry is sane or just, but how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
I personally won't, because I've never used it. I am 100% against it being shut down though.
> I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?
Read my comment again and find the spot where I said 'nothing'.
> I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing
You can start by defining what 'health of books' even means, but your conclusion here seems seriously perverse.
> how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?
What is belittling about acknowledging the fact that current works (especially technical/non-fiction) heavily draw from previous works? The last few technical books I read literally had zero original/unique information - they were just re-organization/re-phrasing/compilation of other works. That's not a bad thing - I think it's great, and the books are great, but is that justification for restricting access to this information - when it is literally 100% based on other works?
So maybe, like art, texts will become sheer passion projects - even technical texts. Otherwise, I'm sure LLMs will be able to replace their usefulness soon.
also kindle unlimited
Libgen and the like tend to just have more on hand though, and that's the big differentiator in usability IMO. There are things your local library just isn't going to have a copy of but libgen will. After that happens once, why bother with the library again? Outside of "it's legal" or "I find more moral" type concepts there tends not to be a strong reason.
Libgen is not Netflix for books, it is thepiratebay for books. Libgen is not helpful in discovering more books because if to judge about those literature which is abundant on Libgen, the technical one, what allows user to discover some books on Libgen is only another books or your interest to specific scientist or field.
(I know there are a lot of fiction materials on Libgen such as comicses but all I use to read is science books or at least some non-fiction, so my opinion may be biased).
Plenty of books (and other written works, such as serial publications) are in the public domain, hence fully legal from a copyright POV. However discovery is still a major problem: many works in the public domain are still far from being easily findable or accessible online. (Even then, it's worth keeping in mind that the books people generally think of as the 'Greatest Books of the Western Canon' are, by and large, in the public domain, and that already is more books than you could feasibly read in a lifetime.)
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Rex+van+der+spuy&lg_topic=l...
Google gave me link, searching my name turned them up.