I had a feeling this was going to happen when I saw that there were authors namedropping libgen while going after the AI people. Might wanna get all your last minute downloads out of the way now before the service gets disrupted.
I’m not too worried. There are a lot of shadow libraries that mirror each other’s content. Z-library is going strong on Tor, and Anna’s Archive is a fairly new player with pretty much everything.
Libgen has a lot of domains and mirrors internally, too.
The nice thing about books is that they’re relatively small. It’s a lot easier to host everything than with other forms of media.
Nooo
This vast infringement is causing publishers and authors serious financial and creative harm, publishers allege.
Creative harm? As in switching out one graph for the another? Mixing up the table of contents? Maybe adding a sentence or two every few years when that research paper is in the public domain?
*worlds tiniest violin
an average of over 9 million visitors per month from the United States
Who wouldn’t be able to pursue a credible education otherwise.
Publishers should shut the fuck up and take the money that is given to them by rich kids parents. Everyone else can’t afford their shit. They’re making the decades old mistake of thinking that everyone that downloads their books freely would’ve paid for it.
“The Libgen sites deprive plaintiffs and their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and plaintiffs’ works, and may cause plaintiffs to cease publishing certain works,” the complaint says.
The plaintiffs artificially inflate textbook prices so it all balances out.
we are quickly careening towards a world where textbooks cost $500 a pop and the majority of students obtain their books illegally. Piracy is a pain in the ass, but if students need their textbooks and the publishers make it impossible to obtain textbooks without taking out a loan, then publishers are effectively paying students to spend the time figuring out piracy. If a student makes $15 an hour at their job, then they could spend 30 hours researching and downloading their textbook and it would still be a better use of their time than actually buying a $500 textbook.
