The IPFS mirror really gives a substantial performance boost. In the past, the files had to be fetched from a tired server far away in Russia, the speed can be as low as 0.5 Mbps in my experience (depends on your ISP and connectivity), now it can be lightning fast thanks to P2P, 2 Mbps+, more than adequate to download a 100 MiB+ file. You don't even have to install IPFS (but you probably should, to maintain decentralization), books can be downloaded straight via HTTPS from Cloudflare's IPFS reverse proxy (called a "gateway"), cloudflare-ipfs.com.<p>The IPFS network itself cannot be taken down, but I wonder when will the publishers discover IPFS web gateways, and start filing DMCA takedown requests against them, and what are the gateways gonna do? Will Cloudflare implement a huge copyright blocklist or even terminate its service (or worse, send a list of IP addresses to Prentice Hall or Elsevier)? What about the semi-official ipfs.io gateway? And the smaller independent IPFS gateways (there are currently 10+ on the public web)? Will they be DMCAed out of existence?
What's missing from this system(and P2P systems in general), is automatic pinning - i.e. the system automatically choses which files to pin on which user, to ensure every file is available on the net.<p>It's a bit of tricky problem, because people may not like unknown, random files on their pc, and probably, because such algorithm is distributed and will need to resist attacks.<p>But i think that the payoff is big: what Bitorrent did to popular files, such an algorithm could do to rare files.
I wrote this <a href="https://github.com/frrad/skyhub" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/frrad/skyhub</a> the other day to provide a nicer interface on top of the scihub torrents.
A strange choice given that distributing copyrighted materials violates the IPFS Code of Conduct [0]. Why not use BitTorrent whose attitude toward copyright is much more in sync with libgen's?<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md#copyright-violations" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduc...</a>
The linked article does not introduce the project, nor does the project site have an about page. wikipedia to the rescue!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis</a>
Wikipedia<p>> The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices.
"- Recommended at least 16GB RAM and Intel i5 or equivalent processor
- Recommended at least 100 mbps, gigabit connection preferred"<p>And I was going to try this one of my embedded computers :(
Is book piracy a major concern for the publishing industry? Many avid readers that I know are happier buying the physical book because they like the feel of reading from a book. Have others found this to be true as well? I wonder if younger folks are less susceptible to this feeling.
I'm hesitant to participate in IPFS in the context of libgen.<p>Torrenting copyrighted materials (especially if you are distributing) can be quite expensive in some jurisdictions and I do not believe that IPFS is treated different than regular BitTorrent.
By the way, there is also a LibGen plugin[1] for Calibre book manager and reader.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/MCOfficer/LibGen-calibre" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/MCOfficer/LibGen-calibre</a>