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gardnr

Have you been to your local library?

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…

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My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.

There is a digital equivalent. Your local library allows you to borrow e-books or e-audio-books. (Probably.)

The apps are a bit janky, but they're there.

The apps are beyond janky compared to free PDFs and epubs delivered in seconds from libgen with no login.

Long live libgen - one of my favourite places on the ‘net.

The notion of 'borrowing' an e-book, which has no intrinsic limit to number of times it can be checked out or when it must be returned, is a joke.

Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.

As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.

Those are missing many books because they only work at the whim of the publishers. Also they cost extra money to run which further limits them.

My library service has an e-book loan system. When I go to get an item - if they have it - it is often "unavailable to borrow". Ridiculous.

I don't need to use any janky apps to borrow a physical book though.

I am pretty sure they do, this data is just too valuable. At least meta admitted using a dataset called "books3" which contains ~200k pirated ebooks for llama 1 and 2 [1]. Anna's archive provides datasets for LLM training, but who knows who they are working with..

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 is the library concept adapted to the digital age where copying is zero cost. It's what official government sponsored libraries should be providing today. Instead we have publishers controlling how libraries can distribute works digitally and on what devices the users can view them.

> 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.

> Have you been to your local library?

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

Have you lived in a developing country?

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