Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

(torrentfreak.com)

349 points | by hn_acker 11 hours ago ago

91 comments

  • sureglymop 3 hours ago ago

    I will say that in my college classes, the first thing I always do is to download the PDFs of the recommended books to accompany the classes.

    Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty).

    Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages.

    I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.

    • freefaler an hour ago ago

      There also good resources like: annas-archive, libgen, and the good old sci-hub.

      For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient.

      Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs:

      https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF

      makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier.

      Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.

    • throwaway983561 2 hours ago ago

      That's exactly my use case. Every single time I read (not totally as reading from a regular screen is not for me) a book from a PDF and I like it I definitely purchase a physical copy. I do the same if I hear an album that I like. Imagine like spending 150U$S on a book and it turns out that the approach is not for you. Every book is different and so are readers. What might be a good read for me might not necessary apply to other readers. Z-Lib and Libgenesis are a bliss and hope they are never taken down.

  • OsrsNeedsf2P 8 hours ago ago

    At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking.

    I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.

    • qwertox a minute ago ago

      In the 90s I downloaded tons of Warez. In the 00s I spent thousands of € in software which I properly evaluated and learned to use in the 90s.

    • anonym29 6 hours ago ago

      The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available.

      Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.

      An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.

      • coldtea 2 hours ago ago

        >The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.

        The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.

        But the idea that without piracy sales would be greater, sometimes substantially, because some pirated copies do represent "lost sales" is much more realistic though.

        The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking. Even for stuff one likes, once they have it in pirated form, they have little to no incentive to buy it (except a small niche wanting to "own the physical product" like a collector, which can sometimes be the case for music and games, but not software in general).

        • thanksgiving 44 minutes ago ago

          > The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking.

          You are thinking logically. Humans are NOT logical.

          In some other countries, Politicians hold huge banquets right before election day. Lots of people eat at these banquets. They could go vote for someone else after eating the free food because it is a secret ballot. However, overwhelmingly those who got to eat the free food will vote for the people who reliably show up to feed them every election. Why? Because humans are not logical.

          Same applies here. You'd think people have already gotten free books or music or whatever. But if they like something, they want to be a part of it. Even if they don't personally pay for it, If they really like it, they will share it with others. Who in turn will likely pay for it.

          Also I remember something profound I read when I was younger. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. The fear for anything that is worthy of copyright isn't piracy, it is being irrelevant and forgotten, out of the zeitgeist. If piracy can keep something relevant, it is worth the cost.

        • fsflover 2 hours ago ago

          EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)

          280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476

          • Beretta_Vexee 38 minutes ago ago

            A few months ago there was a rather funny article in a French film magazine (cahier du cinéma). The director of a film school was complaining that his students obviously didn't know how to pirate films any more, so they couldn't get hold of classic films. So he found himself with a population of film students who had practically only seen blockbusters from the last ten years. They had tried to set up a media library with DVDs and Blu-ray discs, but with the disappearance of physical media and disc players, it was no longer working.

            The director was quite bitter. The fight against piracy has therefore rendered auteur movies invisible and has only benefited Hollywood.

          • amarcheschi an hour ago ago

            In some cases it is actually beneficial (videogames) (I'm not gonna read the study, just trusting what I read online)

            Study link https://felixreda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/displacement...

          • Cumpiler69 an hour ago ago

            >EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings

            Intentionally hiding stuff the taxpayers paid for should be illegal and sanctioned with jail time. I'm tired by the lack of accountability our elected leaders have.

            "Oh shucks, seems like I accidentally and irrecoverably deleted all these emails between me and a CEO about a multi billion taxpayer funded contract, not sure how that happened, I'm such a klutz, hihi."

        • graemep 2 hours ago ago

          > The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.

          I think it is more often something people have to pretend to believe in order to maximise damages in breach of copyright cases.

      • elevaet 3 hours ago ago

        For better or for worse, some people who can afford otherwise do piracy, out of protest. For example several people I know personally buy music exclusively on bandcamp. If it's not on there, they pirate it. No streaming, no iTunes etc.

      • doctorpangloss 3 hours ago ago

        Should Apple be the only ones allowed to make money? You can't pirate Apple News, iCloud Storage, all sorts of services and conventional media they provide. You can't pirate App Store IAP. You don't have to make a single value judgement to see that the status quo - the only permissible action to take against piracy is to make unassailable DRM - is really just conceding that the fully vertically integrated platforms ought to own anything. Surely it's not good that only Apple is allowed to make money.

        • BrenBarn 3 hours ago ago

          That's certainly the status quo. One remedy that comes immediately to mind is to simply ban vertically integrated platforms like that and forcibly break them up.

          • Cumpiler69 42 minutes ago ago

            People here don't like to hear this, but that's the only realistic solution to the current big tech monopolies sucking all the air in the room and spawn-camping small players before they take off.

        • JSR_FDED 5 minutes ago ago

          Wait, what? Apple is bad because they don’t provide a way for you to pirate content they sell?

        • vinay_ys 2 hours ago ago

          It takes a lot of effort to build a system that is both user-friendly and does implement sophisticated mechanisms to prevent bypassing permissions controls. Apple has taken the pains to do that well and then to maintain it against an unending barrage of attacks. So they deserve to make money.

        • nug an hour ago ago

          You can definitely pirate IAP. Back in the day it was as easy as using a proxy. Nowadays you need to inject 3rd party software into the app.

        • notpushkin 3 hours ago ago

          Those are services that depend on Apple servers. If you also make a service, others can’t pirate it (they’ll have to set up their own server, which means it’s not really your service now).

          Of course, this only works if you secure your server side properly. I remember using cracked versions of Wolfram Alpha for Android back in high school and those worked like a charm. I don’t think they lose a lot of revenue though.

  • bastard_op 10 hours ago ago

    Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy.

    Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.

    • siamese_puff 5 hours ago ago

      100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop.

      These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.

      • instagraham 4 hours ago ago

        If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products).

        Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job.

        I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.

        • ivell 4 hours ago ago

          Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.

    • petra 2 hours ago ago

      A lot of great software today is SAAS. They seem to have solved the problem.

    • jjtheblunt 9 hours ago ago

      You said you relied on piracy.

      But piracy means you were in spirit and partly in reality stealing the work product of those who learned a few years before you.

      Would you want your work value to be diluted by piracy?

      • bee_rider 7 hours ago ago

        It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing.

        Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved.

        This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell.

        If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).

        • firesteelrain 4 hours ago ago

          If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

          Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed.

          Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

          • echoangle 4 hours ago ago

            > If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

            Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff.

            > Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

            No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.

            • firesteelrain 5 minutes ago ago

              Using a gym for free is a theft of services. All states have a law like this. For example, Florida Statutes § 812.014.

              Pirating is theft.

          • eesmith 3 minutes ago ago

            > If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym ..

            Theft of services and copyright infringement are two very different bodies of law and cannot be compared this way.

            For example, at 11:59pm on New Year's Eve this year, if I sell you a copy of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms", that violates copyright law unless I have an agreement with the copyright holder. However, if I wait 1 minute, it will enter the public domain, and I am free to do so.

            There is no equivalent to the public domain for using a gym.

            > Creator of the thing sets the terms.

            The copyright holder sets the terms that end users agree to, which is rarely the creator.

            For example, the copyright for commercial software is often held by the company, and not the software developers who created it. The work product of an employee is considered "work-for-hire", which means the employer is treated as the legal author.

            Companies don't create. Unlike people, companies don't exist except as a shared consensus.

            This means the people who make unauthorized copies of software are almost never breaking terms set by the creator, they are breaking terms set by the copyright holder.

            The distribution oligarchy for fields like music and books puts the creator in a Faustian situation where technically the creator does set the original terms, but there's no real chance of distribution without transferring copyright ownership and control of terms over to the distributor, with little say on the end-user terms.

            We can see a glimpse of what a "creator sets the terms" world looks like with copyright termination, where a creator can regain copyright after 35 years, as with Victor Willis and the YMCA song.

            > But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

            The legally correct ending is "via copyright infringement", because copyright infringement isn't stealing.

            I mean, wage theft is much closer to stealing, and yet wage theft is usually (but not always) under civil law while stealing is usually under criminal law, so clearly the legal distinctions are important.

            There's been hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising over the last 50 or so years to try to convince everyone that copyright infringement is equivalent to criminal theft or privacy. It's apparently worked on you.

            Yet even though wage theft is massive, with dollar amounts which exceed actual theft, there's an almost complete lack of advertising equating the two. Almost as if the people who profit from copyright transfers from creators, and the people who profit from wage theft, have more control over advertising, and thus our perceptions of how things work.

      • LocalH 8 hours ago ago

        Piracy isn't stealing. Legally or morally.

        You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.

        • hresvelgr 6 hours ago ago

          Copyright and patents actively stifle innovation. I think a statute of 5 years for both is acceptable. If you fail to be commercially viable in 5 years it probably wasn't on the cards but at least someone can learn from the work and continue with it after it lapses.

          • ashoeafoot 4 hours ago ago

            That world we life in sure feels innovative ..not. 1 new thing per day,with 8 billion humans alive and connected. The web promising the new edison or tesla, meanwhile those two lifed in a time of mass book copying without repercussions. Copyright is toxic, extractive landlording , mining innovationspaces with penalties and bureaucracies. Its deeply anti-libertarian on an individual level.

            People should be allowed to violate copyright all they want, but if they create something comercial the "inspiring work" as derived from the consumption history should get a kickback.

          • PittleyDunkin 6 hours ago ago

            Both are blatantly anti-competitive measures.

            • tastyfreeze 4 hours ago ago

              That is the point. A legal time limited monopoly. But it has to be time limited or progress is stalled. Five years is plenty of lead time to be remain ahead of competition.

        • PrismCrystal 40 minutes ago ago

          I have never been sympathetic to the notion that copyright has just been extended too long. Copyright itself is the problem. For example, for an academic from a poor region trying to keep up with publications in his field, even the short length of copyright set out by the American Founding Fathers, is too long.

      • lubujackson 7 hours ago ago

        What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had).

        What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth.

        No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.

      • ericd 8 hours ago ago

        They're talking about learning, probably as a broke teenager who wouldn't have been able to pay anything, I think you can save the outrage.

      • llm_trw 6 hours ago ago

        If I hadn't pirated Photoshop when I was a kid I would have just never used it.

        The question here isn't that adobe would have seem more money, it's that a 12 year old would have not made some image macros.

      • pizza 8 hours ago ago

        I would prefer for my work value to be multiplied by piracy, personally.

        • compootr 8 hours ago ago

          Mee too! Although I like the mentality of "make it easier to use without piracy than with" (i.e excessive drm)

      • RF_Savage 5 hours ago ago

        Yet to meet anyone who could have bought a full fat commercial Autocad or Solidworks license as a 13yo kid. Even more so 20 years ago.

      • al_borland 8 hours ago ago

        There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it.

        I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it.

        Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.

      • shrubble 9 hours ago ago

        You wouldn't download a car ...

      • LennyHenrysNuts 9 hours ago ago

        If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing.

        Enough with the false equivalence.

        • fragmede 9 hours ago ago

          If.

          I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it.

          Enough with the false dichotomy.

          • PittleyDunkin 6 hours ago ago

            You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.

      • mxkopy 7 hours ago ago

        The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down.

        It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.

      • underlipton 9 hours ago ago

        Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery.

        IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.

  • richrichie 3 minutes ago ago

    > “Living in a 3rd world country, 1 book would cost like 50%- 80% already of my daily wage,” one Redditor wrote.

    Typical technical books are priced at upwards of $50. $100 a day is not poor by any means in 3rd world countries.

  • nathancahill 2 hours ago ago

    We need the equivalent of Z-Library or Sci-Hub for standards documents. It's a shakedown to pay $300 for a PDF of a public standard.

  • wortelefant 3 hours ago ago

    Annas Archive is even more popular these days, these shadow libraries often present a better user experience than many online bookstores as well.

  • jomoho an hour ago ago

    I think it's just replacing what a a good Library or Bookstore would have given you in previous times: cross reading many different books, without having to commit and pay upfront. The assumption that I'm going to pay for a book upfront without being able to leaf through it from front to back is preposterous.

  • mkolodny 6 hours ago ago

    On VirusTotal, 5 different vendors flag Z-Library as malicious. Are they just flagging the site because of IP issues, or is the site full of malware?

    • ajvs 3 hours ago ago

      If you're going to the official domains linked from their Wikipedia article then there's definitely no malware.

  • humanlity 7 hours ago ago

    Never forget Aaron Swartz

  • petterroea 5 hours ago ago

    > The findings, however, suggest that students are more likely to draw comparisons with “Robin Hood”.

    This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles.

    In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.

  • elashri 10 hours ago ago

    > Z-Library, or a similar website, is helpful to students living in poverty (82% agree).

    I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?

    I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.

    • crazygringo 10 hours ago ago

      I would assume that a good chunk of students in poverty simply don't have a device that works well for consuming books on.

      If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.)

      I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.)

      And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)

      • thfuran 9 hours ago ago

        >And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)

        It's a disgrace that universities are willing to use books that have been turned into consumable goods by single-use software or usurious saas rental messes.

        • Xxfireman 7 hours ago ago

          Yes, this is how textbook manufactures sell to university. One time codes for online exercises / labs. This happens mostly for intro classes. I have no idea why universities do this, my guess is they are sold on hw problems being randomized so it makes cheating more difficult.

      • jfvinueza 8 hours ago ago

        If you don't have a laptop, the place you live in / study at probably doesn't have a good public library.

    • rany_ 10 hours ago ago

      > Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?

      That really can't be it because the question isn't about whether it is moral, legal or good for publishers.

      I really think this is just elitism and gatekeeping at its worst.

      • shlomo_z 10 hours ago ago

        That's why this _can_ be it. If authors stop writing books it will hurt students (who wont have books to read). Nothing to do with ethics or morals.

    • melagonster 9 hours ago ago

      Maybe they do not need more textbooks? If they do not need to follow newest version of it, they can get second hand book.

      • al_borland 8 hours ago ago

        Maybe I was a bad student, but I stopped buying books after my freshman year, unless there was a very specific reason to have it. I really didn’t use most of them.

        I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.

        • DiscourseFan 8 hours ago ago

          It depends on your major. For those who study English, for instance, many of the assigned books are out of copywrite already. And new books are market price so they won't be more than 20 dollars. And if you're in a not so conservative English department a lot of the "theory" texts, aside from the more obscure ones, are freely available online because they're written by people who care more about intellectual freedom than making a buck or two.

    • foundry27 10 hours ago ago

      I’d guess the easiest explanation (which admittedly erases all nuance) is that folks just misinterpreted the question and reflexively dismissed it as soon as they saw “Z-Library” and “Helpful”.

      I’d also be inclined to discard theoretical “in the long run it’ll be unhelpful” concerns, since that opens up an infinitely-deep can of hypothetical contrived scenarios of arbitrary complexity that can’t be disproven. I’m sure there are very real concerns, but it’s impossible to reason about which concerns specifically people would care about.

      IMO that leaves the purely practical concerns:

      - Students in poverty might not have reliable internet, devices or digital literacy. If zlib isn’t available to them, it isn’t helpful

      - Books available might not cater to the local language/culture, or the real world curriculum needs of those students. If zlib doesn’t help them succeed, it isn’t helpful

      - The interface sucks and is confusing, which makes students struggle to find what‘s useful. If zlib isn’t useable for them, it isn’t helpful

    • bluedays 8 hours ago ago

      I could play devils advocate and say that it’s bad for poor students because if authors are not fairly compensated then these authors won’t write textbooks and if they don’t then future students won’t benefit from having the textbooks.

      • tomrod 8 hours ago ago

        Few academic authors are in it for the money.

        • DiscourseFan 8 hours ago ago

          I mean yeah, getting your work published just means that you can sue if someone steals it (often the case with those university presidents that they plagiarized work from undergrads or those who otherwise couldn't fight back). But if publishers stop making money off academic texts, then they won't be inclined to fight those battles. Then again, a lot of the money comes from university library subscriptions to entire catalogues of texts including books and articles, so either something you want to access is already in your ecosystem or it isn't.

      • 8note 6 hours ago ago

        When my courses had profs who had written the book, they'd have the school book store print and bind them to booklets, and sell them for close enough to cost, and also put up a download link for the pdf

    • crvdgc 3 hours ago ago

      An interpretation given the benefit of the doubt is, using Z-library might get the said student in trouble and therefore is not helpful overall.

    • vundercind 9 hours ago ago

      What’s the lizardman constant? 4% or so? There’s some of it.

    • theendisney 10 hours ago ago

      "Educated slaves are unhappy"

      • cynicalsecurity 2 hours ago ago

        Educated slaves also refuse to work for peanuts.

  • joshdavham 7 hours ago ago

    I'll still never forget the day I learned about the existence of Z-library.

    I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library.

    I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"

  • dzonga 2 hours ago ago

    knowledge should be free - for the benefit of mankind.

  • photochemsyn 8 hours ago ago

    Academic textbooks are mostly a racket, forced upon a captive market (the student body) and - with rare but notable exceptions - not books that most students would care to hold onto after graduation.

    Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts.

    Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.

    • DiscourseFan 6 hours ago ago

      Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets. If you used an LLM, you'd have to proof every single problem to make sure there weren't issues with it that would lead to student's having unintended difficulties with them. Yes it "saves time," until a problem is assigned whose "right answer" takes not only far longer than all the others but is ridiculously complex and impossible to grade or complete in any reasonable amount of time.

      Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself, and it also keeps answers from circulating amongst students, and saves time for the professor who won't have to do the above every single week, they can just pick however many problems they like out of the book for the relevant section.

      • PittleyDunkin 6 hours ago ago

        > Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets.

        Who gives a damn about publishers?

        They introduce artificial distribution costs; They are not capable of or refuse to fact-check; the copy-editing they provide is well within the capabilities of ai; at best they introduce asset-providers (eg illustrators) to writers.

        > Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself

        Who cares? The western academic system is already laughably bad at weeding out the incapable. Just let people cheat. It's not like people aren't cheating already.

        • dgfitz 5 hours ago ago

          When I went to college, two of the calc professors were married. They co-authored the calc book… for calc 1, 2, and 3. Did not matter which class you were taking, (1,2, or 3) one was required to buy the whole book.

          They changed the problem sets once a year. So at minimum you were basically obligated to buy the book twice, if not 3 times.

  • mgraybosch 7 hours ago ago

    I don't blame them. If buying isn't owning, then downloading isn't stealing.

  • cynicalsecurity 2 hours ago ago

    I'm surprised they were on the regular internet and not on Tor. Like, what else did they expect.

  • theendisney 7 hours ago ago

    I dont have to like it but if we are doing competitive capitalism we should upgrade the citizens as much as possible. In stead of publicly funded limitations we should spend the money on the opposite. If we want to win the game that is.

  • medo-bear 4 hours ago ago

    libgen is the modern library of alexandria. and it is free as in beer. thank you russians

  • anonym29 6 hours ago ago

    Especially in the age of DRM (enshittification of ownership), where many games that lose functionality when the developer shuts down servers, where ebooks routinely get redacted, rewritten, or censored, where the availability of movies you "bought" shifts year by year as licensing changes occur, it is evident that "buying" no longer means "owning", and if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.