As a Russian, I agree in the part that it seems extremely unlikely our government would even think about doing something like this. (Wikipedia says it started explicitly in 1990’s RuNet though, which I am inclined to believe.)

A further issue that’s often overlooked in English-language discussion is Russian-language books.

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.

Yes this has been a misdirection from the publishers for a while that even some librarians are repeating (other things are supposedly stolen credentials used to do more than just getting access to publications).

Russian government not caring about enforcing western corporation's copyright does play a big role.

> a download is not a lost sale

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.

Can she not get any inter library loan?

My thoughts exactly; I recall stumbling across libgen back in 2018 - it even had a user forum; back then it was clearly just a one-person operation. I got the impression it was someone who liked collecting, organising and sharing PDFs that interested them. And then with time it, the site blew up in popularity.

Occam's razor is strong here

Surely at this point your average pdf viewer is sandboxed to hell and back? (Eg your browser).

If I wanted to run JS in someone’s browser I don’t need a pdf to do it.

In principle, any piece of software can have zero-days in it. PDF readers included.

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.

More like post-Soviet. Regardless of the country of operation (which included e.g. Ecuador at some point, in which the owner of lib.rus.ec, the predecessor of libgen, moved), all these shadow libraries and knowledge preservation attempts represent consistent political action by the individuals with views formed by samizdat and the Soviet/post-crash reading culture. That includes Sci-Hub, Libgen, and those most never heard about but which were extremely influential, like the SU.BOOKS BBS or lib.ru.

Actually not sure about LibGen in its current manifestation, but the wikipedia page clearly traces its origin and earlier iterations to Russia

I don't think there's any evidence of that, it's just supposition based on them being unable to locate them.

The majority of these "mom and pop e-commerce stores here in the states" are dropshipping enterprises that deserve to die.

Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.

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.

> Why aren't … operating solely as an onion service on TOR?

> 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?

I believe this should work: <http://genotypeinczgrxr.onion/>

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.

Doesn't z-lib have a kind of hybrid approach where some things are available on clearnet but for certain account-based features it's TOR?

"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.

I use libgen on tor.

We're are talking about PDFs. A few mb usually. The speed hit of tor is probably fine. Also its a text book. Most users probably find some download latency acceptable.

I imagine the real reason is normies dont have tor installed.

You only need a dynamic-DNS system on the hidden service. Then you can avoid the regulatory capture of registrars and host in a friendly country.

AA is purely an indexer, the performance hit would be more felt during the actual downloads.

> China proved the Great Firewall was possible.

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.

We already see mass censorship of legal speech via centralization and deplatforming, particularly via Cloudflare (which continues to happily host CSAM, animal SAM, and various other genuinely illegal websites). It is the unfortunate reality that the Internet will become various internets.

I don't think that's necessary as app stores are already regional and easy to put additional restrictions on, and desktop internet usage is slowly being overtaken by app usage. And who knows, maybe even Windows 15 will only allow software downloaded through Safe and Verified(tm) app stores.

Their datadump strategy is questionable. You end up needing perhaps 1 book for each shard. I guess they are made by sorting the ISBN or some other numerical field and then grouped until they reach a certain size. It is a bit annoying to put the shard of interest to download in your torrent client, pause it, figure out which book is the one you are after by looking at the ids, instruct your torrent client to only download that book.

In this case it's not the privacy you need from ToR but access so it doesn't really matter if the NSA runs the exit nodes because you're not exiting.

That's irrelevant if you are talking about hidden services.

And mostly irrelavent for clearnet in a world where everything is https.

Post the Anna's Archive tor link and I will send you 5 USDC

> It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks.

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.

IPFS is a network that solves your coordination problem, compared to torrents it allows you to decide which chunks you want to store and it will even de-duplicate automatically across different "torrents" that happen to include the exact same byte-identical file.

> regular people can help

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.

This does seem like it would be the way to handle such libraries, considering the immense size of them. I'd be curious to hear about any efforts in this area, of anyone knows of any.

Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual files in a torrent and if the hashes are correct, download from a bunch and rebuild the torrent.

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.

[dead]

If you're not ashamed to admit it, perhaps that's because you recognize that it's not stealing, and that you don't actually believe in the concept of Intellectual Property, the legal fiction (invented relatively recently to prop up industries) that all of this is based on.

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.

Here in Brazil shadow libraries essentially make research possible. Paying for ebooks in US dollar is prohibitive to most academics.

Being able to access computing books from late 80s and early 90s is great: DOS AutoCAD tutorial books (Laying out PCBs, tutorials) to see how it's changed. I also like being able to access books about programming the Amiga, I find that great. A lot of those authors have made the books available publicly for non-commercial use.

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.

Yandex is an exceptional resource for finding torrent sites these days. It’s still out there.

If they can't operate on the clearnet they will take it to Tor or I2P.

Tpb is still up after what 25 years?

What's AA in this context...?

I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.

The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.

I imagine your self published works are available for a reasonable price. In this event, piracy is less tempting. Papers and academic books often cost upwards of $75.

Furthermore, assuming your work is priced reasonably, imagine the content was not available within a shadow library. Would the people pirating it have paid? Or would they have given up, barred due to their financial situation. Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for

You need to look beyond yourself and the fruits of the labour you feel entitled to.

Look at the whole market, look at market prices, understand how piracy works. If you want to not have your work pirated, you probably have to do what Steam did for video games (and very successfully!) You must sell your work at a price and format that beats piracy for the end user. Piracy involves hassle and risk. But it is the only way to get DRM-free content for most consumers that they truly get to keep forever. If you sell your book for a price your target audience can’t afford in relation to the value it provides, and you may not even sell your book in a true digital ownership way, but only effectively license it, then some consumers won’t want to buy that and piracy is an alternative.

You may say that you are unwilling to offer your work at a price palatable to people more than piracy. And that is your prerogative. But you will always have a degree of piracy in what you put out then. This is the market reality.

You should calculate what makes most sense to you — maybe it is higher price and piracy, maybe it is lower price, DRM-free and no piracy, or if neither work and you truly can’t sell your work in the actual reality of the market, maybe not doing the work makes sense.

So you want to multiply your benefits but not accept such with your deficits? That's the advantage of digital distribution vs typical labor distribution. When I did laborer work I had no way to easily multiply my work output as it's not intellectual work, for the most part. If you make a moderate income, you should feel very entitled and lucky if you complain when you can easily distribute and multiply your labor as opposed to those who work in more physical fields. But someone might say 'yeah, well get a better job' but the point is when someone's working a very laborious and dangerous job out in the elements, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone making good on the amplification of intellectual labor.

As to your question, I'm sure those who were more intellectually inclined throughout history tended to do well despite not having a printing press and its offspring. If you're truly putting out something useful to the people, be it ideas, stories, etc, then you should have no problem getting by from your output.

People pirating your work were less likely to purchase it anyway, likely because it was economically not feasible to do so in the first place, but with the new readers you have, its likely that some of them do end up purchasing it at a later date. Getting robbed by piracy is mostly a fiction and nothing more.

Your businesses model is wrong. Don't make your businesses/profit model be one of artificial scarcity, as it was in the previous millennium.

Instead, write a TOC and say a first chapter. And give it free. Then establish a target price/profit you want in total for each additional chapter. Setup a "fund me" and release the chapter ONLY after you've received your full payment.

If your content is good, people will pay enough for your next chapter. And you will be fairly compensated for your writing work.

Maybe it's time to "publish" a revised version of your work to include a preamble to the pirate readers with your crypto wallet address. You might be surprised when you find that many pirates are very generous individuals if you provided them the motivation and means.

Are there any numbers on how the availability of books in this way negatively impacts sales? Bear in mind that often people resort to such libraries because they are unable to buy a copy (out of print, not available in their country), can’t afford to buy (so they wouldn’t be paying anyway) or just want to look something up (wouldn’t bother buying the book just for that).

>I am a self published author. So anyone can alienate me from the fruits of my labour? Do you put shareware/donationware messages in your book? Hey I need to eat if you do download this send me what you believe this book is worth to this website? >And yes, I have come across free copies of my work. I really do feel sorry for you. There would be nothing worse than something that you have poured your heart and soul into and just gets stolen. I'm not a fan of thieves, nothing worse than spending hours doing a job you hate, buying something and to get it stolen AND you must get even more annoyed if the people are making money if your work. As some one who struggles writing lab reports and doing case studies in Engineering I find it difficult to write compared to doing the calculations. All the time doing the research I can not imagine how it must feet for you.

You got off lucky. Imagine if one of those government Mecca's of sanctioned piracy called a library had bought your book and put it on public exhibition for free? The estimated losses to the publishing industry are in the billions of dollars in the last decade alone. They are freely given physical copies of your copyrighted work with the mere promise that they will be returned. Many are stolen, and when they are the thief is rarely charged, and the copyrighted material is simply replaced so that it may be made public again. Meanwhile you get a payment equivalent to maybe a fast food meal.

Show us 1 author available in shadow libraries who would literally starve. It's ridiculous. If you can pay, you'll pay. And if you can't you were never part of the market

> And let the authors starve?

Absolutely! Since publishers have gotten severely obese on profits, it is definitely time to get them on a starvation diet.

These folks are using the power of the American state to enforce American copyright even in the third world.

Like a previous commenter said - To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.

Who cares?

Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences.

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

  It is good that authors should be remunerated;
  and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them
  is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil.

  For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil;
  but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is
  necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

  The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers
  for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is
  an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most
  innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never
  let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a
  premium on vicious pleasures.

  I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty
  to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty,
  I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax.
  Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown
  that by so doing I should proportionally increase the
  bounty.

  My complaint is, that my honorable and learned friend
  doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely
  any perceptible addition to the bounty.

  Just as the absurd Acts which prohibited the sale of game
  were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd
  revenue Acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler,
  so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.

  At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.
  Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out
  of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them
  restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains.
  No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful
  transactions.

  Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.

  Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers
  will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital
  will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art
  will be employed to evade legal pursuit;
  and the whole nation will be in the plot.

  Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong
  and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say
  where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.

  The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace
  and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
  And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints
  on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent,
  annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding
  the living.

Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. The time for compromise has long since passed. These monopolies have become intolerable. Only thing we care about is their end.

authors are already starving; publishers don't want to pay them either.

[dead]

> The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work,

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...

Do you really believe that? Stuff like that is really troublesome to keep alive. Piratebay is hardly the thing is was, and it's a torrent site, which is relatively easy to host. A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore. They only exist because of almost fanatical dedication of some highly productive individuals, god bless them. Even if they don't get into serious trouble, it's still a hassle to avoid getting into trouble and work with actual content, not just host a bunch of torrent-links other people provide. So, at some point they'll lose the desire to do that, and I am not so sure that there always will be somebody to take post.

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.

With old torrents, nothing compared to its heyday. I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now. 5-10 years ago it used to me newzbins and demonoid

It keeps the lawyers employed

tpb is not really still extant

I was considering getting one but your comment worries me. Do you have an older device? I thought the device itself could do the DRM if you threw an acsm file at it?

There are online vendors who will lease out their AdX accounts. The industry is rife with fraud.

Meh. Not really.

The biggest vulnerability for hackers has always been trying to get normie clout for our actions. Whether back in the day from pure social bragging, or now from trying to tie in to contemporary surveillance media. It's painful to watch, but if they had been more reserved you likely wouldn't hearing about them in the first place.

Ryujinx still has a patreon so running a patreon is not what solely did them in.

tag manager can inject scripts that can observe pretty much why interaction with the site

You mean man in the middle deeply suspicious project maintained by who knows who which promotes itself as privacy protecting service.

Yes - don't take my advice, but isn't the precedent with BitTorrent piracy that downloaders aren't gone after, only uploaders?

Anna's Archive is being sued, the court case has been going on for months [1].

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.

More like an estimation of something stolen.

"We don't know who did it but when found they are liable for X€ of damage"

But while ISP's are being ordered to block the site, the $30 million judgment is directed at Libgen itself. Not an ISP or registrar. So I don't think that can be the full answer here.

It's a pretty good OSINT tool for threat actors to map out your operation imho

How can there be any doubt?

It once helped me, romantically. Over dinner, my date said "I'm glad LinkedIn is good for something."

On the balance though, ya, shut it down.

So.. if I want to help and seed the torrents, do I have to download the whole 80-120 TB for this? can I somehow help when I don't have a space for hundred TB on my machine? went to the website but didn't find a guide or anything else on how to do it

Not entirely sure why this was dead. This is the answer to GP's question.

Thanks, was looking for something like this. With all the hardware I'm sure is sitting idle under HN users, we could make a big contribution for ~free.

An obvious candidate in this case would be the pro-rata share of the cost of creation. Possibly offset by ability to pay, e.g. if you can afford to pay a little more then do so because some people can't afford to pay as much and you still want the overall total to cover the cost.

It's an eternal struggle. The "perfect capitalist" wants infinite money with zero cost labor. The "perfect consumer" wants high quality products for free delivered instantly.

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.

There is no pricing that would satisfy the person you are responding to other than free.

Maybe get back to the original 20 years of copyright protection instead of the insane “70 years after death of the author” that has been made solely for the interest of the IP holders?

All my code (that isn't owned by a business, contractually) is free (well, technically I have a couple of private repos, but they're not paid access, they're just not available). So are all of the translation and commission work I did: people were paying to choose what I'd do next, not to keep something exclusive for themselves.

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.

they might suggest various other revenue models aside from royalties.

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

My code could effectively be free. The thing is most consumers don't care for code, they care for products. So I don't think open sourcing a currently closed source project would impact 99% of tech out there.

Eh idk but books should definitely be free. We can talk about the rest once the books are free.

Authors and editors should be able to live from their work and libgen et al should exist as well. I don't think it's so incomprehensible to imagine that reality because we are living that reality right now. We can also save a lot of money if we get rid of publishers. People will always buy physical books that will be enough to sustain authors, on top of that we can subsidize from taxes. You have to remember that not everyone is a liberal.

Authors? Its the publishers who get paid. The authors just write the words.

Unconditional basic income. Grants for the arts. Stipends. Unconditional basic income. Sponsorships. Unconditional basic income. Donations. Maybe even unconditional basic income.

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.

Many have done so, and will continue to do. No one has to be persuaded if they have thoughts on their mind. Compensation is the side-effect.

[0]: https://monoskop.org

[1]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/

[2]: https://computerhistory.org/collections/

[3]: https://oapen.org/

Yes: we can pay authors nothing. It works. In fact we can make them grovel to get something published, and even get them to pay for the privilege of being considered for the publishing we're offering zero compensation for.

We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.

The people who are using libgen, are probably also not the people who would pay an author for a book anyway.

Not saying I agree or disagree one way or another, but that's really probably the reality.

This is like saying that no great software would exist if people didn't get paid for developing software.

> Do you have thoughts on persuading people to spend years of their lives writing books for zero compensation?

Most books make very very little income for the author. So it is already the case.

Do you think books which are written by people who had to be persuaded to write them are worth reading?

Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers. Or that most book authors get ridiculous royalties in their publishing contract (a few percent of the price, including for ebooks that are being sold at the price of paper copies) unless they are already famous.

They should find a patron or grant making institution that values the production of knowledge, not publishers who seek property to license out.

I buy most of my books second hand. The author doesn't get anything from that either. Should it be illegal?

Lots of people already do, in essence.

I think a UBI could be a good start.

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.

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?

I don’t really agree it’s unachievable, just a matter of political will imo. All that would have to happen is enough public interest to outweigh publisher lobbying.

there is a git repo that claims to do it. They might have it for you.

You have it loading? I've repeatedly tried libgen.rs and it claims a typo, despite this being its link.

It's actually amusingly easy to have ChatGPT criticize some OpenAI practice or another. Tell it to do a search for some controversial story, then to "analyze it from an ethical standpoint".

if you ask it to explain how it arrived at this reasoning, they'll ban you.

Seriously, who is running around here on HN downvoting such comments?

RIP Aaron Swartz.

I live in the wrong timeline :(

So, the solution to legal problems is… money? Lots of money?

beautifully put, thank you! it's the golden rule - those with the gold make up the rules.

> maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.

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.

How would this differ from a system of public libraries, which most advanced countries have?

But how should people be incentivized to create new stuff if the old one isn't being hidden away from the public's eyes. /s

> 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.

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.

> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.

Who do you think was feeding the monks?

> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.

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.

> 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.

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'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.

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.

Books are far cheaper to print than most people realize. If you see a publisher charging 5-10% less for an ebook than a physical book, it's because they're pricing the ebook at whatever the physical book's price is, minus the printing costs.

There's a fairly small pool of readers for a niche technical book. Selling it for $0.99 won't meaningfully increase the number of buyers, and it won't recover enough revenue to meet the cost of production.

That's why you see pulp paperbacks selling for $20+ so that the e-book looks like a steal at $15.

I've seen ebooks being sold for more money than the printed version.

lmao. As a painter-turned-software engineer, this rings true.

My library even lets me check out books from Kobo e-reader.

Easily is the operative word. Blockbuster was easy but you had to drive there -- netflix is easier. Libraries similarly require driving (unless you use overdrive / similar) but piracy is easier for many as well. Books just haven't found their spotify/netflix; the kindle store is basically 2009 itunes.

Many but not remotely enough books are in the public domain. Copyright terms are now ridiculously long—the last Sherlock Holmes stories only just entered public domain.

That are not for technical books, and Amazon used to be famous for deleting a book from used's devices. It is not exactly fare to compale an honest source of technical books which allows anyone to download some rare tech books with a source of DRM which requires me to deal with something not exactly reading. Just look at those websites - who is that visitor of libgen website who needs those animations?