I've personally used sites like this as a sort of protest to what universities and authors did to the textbook market. You used to be able to buy used physical textbooks for classes at reasonable prices. They took advantage of the shift to digital by forcing arbitrary changes in edition numbers, solely to sell more books, or by requiring obscure, low-volume books, often written by the professor leading the class. With prices often exceeding $100.
> Not all known Z-Library domains are currently offline. The login portal ‘singlelogin.me’ and booksc.me, for example, remain online. These domains are registered through the Finnish company Sarek Oy, which is affiliated with Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.<p>Nice. Long fly the pirate flags.
I had been using z-lib as a way of "format shifting" some of my books. I live in a small apartment. My books take up too much space. For some, I've found the PDF on z-lib and thrown out the hardcopy.<p>I don't think that is immoral in any way. (And I'm pretty sure it's not illegal -- but IANAL).
So since this was done at the DNS level, not the hosting level, does this mean if you're running a pi-hole or AdGuardHome you can add some extra redirects for zlib to its actual IPs? I guess you could also just hardcode these in your computer's host file but then you have to do it for every device on your LAN. Assuming their IPs change somewhat frequently, is there any way to do this in an auto-updating way?
Such a need for a service like z-library, the outside world sales prices does not make sense in my country, where the price of an ebook is equal to my half a month salary.
Making no comment on ethics, it's amazing that we're able to create a multi-billion dollar industry over gatekeeping 30 TB of data.<p>Obviously there are more books than that but I'm sure it's a long-tail situation.
The servers hosting the data haven't been seized. Within a week there will be a dozen new domains for this information hosted out of Mozambique and Luxemburg or something. What a stupid waste of taxpayers money.
Perhaps Z-Library would benefit by incorporating censotrship-resistant running via Rosen, which someone submitted here not long ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33541351" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33541351</a>
I don't understand how zlibrary can still be up though. If the glowies can seize the domains can't they also seize the servers hosting the data?
I understand IP laws, rewarding the authors, incentivizing future research, etc. etc.<p>But intuitively and conceptually, there is a hypothetical scenario in which all of humanity's knowledge is ~free for anyone to access instantaneously and from anywhere.<p>The current scenario in which every meaningful piece of academic output is heavily paywalled makes for a disheartening comparison.