6 ms·
The Burning of Library.nu (2014)
- qwerty456127 8y agoI hope somebody has backed everything up and would eventually upload to alternative places. I actually wonder why don't people open the websites like that one in i2p or TOR.
- votepaunchy 8y agoWas Library.nu folded into LibGen?
- sitkack 8y agoI believe it was.
- guidovranken 8y agoThe article makes many lofty claims about how knowledge must be free, but how can books continue to be put out if you disincentivize the authors? What's in it for them? Had I been an expert on a niche technical or academic subject in the eighties or nineties I might have published a book on it. These days, certainly not.
- eli 8y agoBook publishers usually give the author a cut of the sales, academic publishers usually don’t pay the authors anything.
- MikeTaylor 8y agoI am an academic, with about 25 scholarly publications, depending on how you count them (see http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/ http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/ for a list and for links to download them). I am here to tell you that we DO NOT GET PAID for writing papers (which, much more than books, are the primary medium of research in the sciences). Of the 25 listed papers, I got paid something for one of them, which was not really research but activism -- and I was paid by the acdvocacy group, not by a publisher. For some of the papers on the list, _I_ paid the _publisher_: this is not unusual. There is literally no downside for an academic author to have his or or her work made freely available to the world: only the considerable upside of greatly increased visibility and influence -- which is the true currency of academia.
- whatshisface 8y agoWhich one of your papers was written for the advocacy group?
- sgc 8y agoAs another academic author who works in vastly different field, I can confirm this is true in all disciplines I have had the opportunity to discuss with colleagues. It is common to pay a thousand and not uncommon to pay a few thousand to get something published, and the most that can be made from an academic book is in the same range. If I were to write for profit, it would be by writing a popularized version of a trending topic with far less academic value than a typical publication.
- matt4077 8y agoYou do get paid for books, however. So you’re just so slightly missing the point.
- barry-cotter 8y agoAcademics may get paid an advance for textbooks, some of which will earn out their advance, an even smaller portion of which will go to a second edition, an even smaller portion of which will make their author some serious money. For the overwhelming majority of books published by academics that are not textbooks fewer than 5,000 will ever be printed and that’s being really generous. They’re academic books, written for academic readers and the only people who make any money on them are the publishers.
- raincom 8y agoMany University presses make money by selling hard bound copies to academic libraries. When some of these books become popular, paperback copies are sold. Usually, a hard bound copies are 3 to 4 times more expensive than paperbacks. Even when academic libraries acquire a paperback copy, they send these books for binding to preserve them for decades, if not centuries. Academics want their books to be published by 'reputed' publishers, so that these books can be accessible in libraries, unless a professor requests his library to acquire it. Now we have so many fiefdoms online: all Oxford University Press publications are available on oxfordscholarship.com. Every major publisher has its own online access. It is like online movie catalogues held by different companies. And no one has access to all of them. This is why even academics go and search on scihub and libgen sites for books, instead of going through their libraries. Academics want their works to be known to fellow academics and the public as well. That's the incentive, not royalty.
- bloaf 8y agoAs an author of a book on a niche technical subject, the profit motive was not actually in the revenue from book sales, but rather the prestige associated with being the author of a book on something.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoMost writing pays very little or nothing. The Stephen Kings and JK Rowlings of the world are very much the exception, not the rule. Money is not the only reason to do something. I'm a freelance writer and blogger. I would love to be financially better off than I am, but the reality is life is much more complicated than just what pays money and what doesn't. Even when you do make money at something, there are things that you have to do that aren't per se monetized, yet are necessary parts of the process. If you try to excise them in the name of profit, it can kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs.
- ben_w 8y agoJust to add, JK Rowling said that she wrote it in the hope that one day one of her kids would find it in a thrift shop and they’d be amazed to see their mum’s name on the cover. She wasn’t expecting to be this successful either.
- watwut 8y agoYeah. She wrote it while she was in sort of double limitation - unable to pay for baby daycare having only money from some social program and unable to find a job because lack of daycare. She was however able to write while caring about baby so she did it.
- Eridrus 8y agoI have quite a few friends who have written technical books, universally they say that the money isn't worth the huge amount of time it takes. So you either do it for the prestige, or because you want to share your knowledge. There's something to be said about low five figures being meaningfully different from zero, but we already have plenty of people sharing knowledge for free, so I'm still pretty convinced this doesn't matter. IMO books need to become more collaborative affairs, rather than spewing out ever more of them. We already have a lot of books that overlap in completely unclear ways, and what we actually need is a way to integrate this knowledge.
- barry-cotter 8y agoHave any of your friends self-published? That seems to be the way of at least possibly making some real money off of publishing a technical book, particularly if you have some added value content you can sell with it as a more expensive package, like a video course, extensive sample code or cheat sheets.
- Eridrus 8y agoNo. Most of them have had good things to say about their editors too. And again, they are not doing with a profit motive in mind, and self-publishing can conflict with other goals, e.g. prestige. Publishers also help your book stand out from the Pakt hordes. Not that all of Pakt is bad, but a lot of people are unwilling to even look at books from there.
- devwastaken 8y agoThere are far more consumers of technical writings due to the accessibility today. Had you been in the 90's you most likely would never afford to publish on the scale possible with online sales today.
- ben_w 8y agoI’m currently writing a book, and I’ll be very impressed and happy if I get as much as $2000 for it. This was not financially “smart” given how long I spent on it (it’s around 400 pages), but even if I was doing this for the money rather than the need to tell the story, my main financial risk isn’t piracy — its all the other highly competent writers writing better books. In fact, my desire to make it the best it can be is why it’s taking me so long…
- scarcely 8y agoDownloading books and articles from libgen is technically "theft of intellectual property". So is torrenting proprietary software, music, etc. I'm often surprised to observe the extent to which Americans, both inside and outside of academia, and regardless of their station in life, overtly engage in this form of 'IP theft', given how much anger there is these days at China for alleged IP theft (I'm granting for the sake of argument that the allegations are fully accurate). Why don't Americans find this form of 'IP theft' equally ethically problematic? I suspect the answer is some combination of: (i) deep down people don't really feel that 'big evil publishers' like Springer, Kluwer etc really deserve all that money; we are less likely to feel bad about 'stealing' from someone if we don't feel that the person from whom we are taking the thing away is morally entitled to it. (ii) $30 per article etc is just too expensive and impractical. Paying is not a consistently followable policy, so we may as well consistent pirate. To the extent that 'Chinese theft of intellectual property' occurs, can it be attributed to the same motivations? Some analogue of (i) arguably obtains. After all, Americans committed two of the biggest thefts in human history: first the entire continent stolen from the natives, then, entire human lives stolen from generations of black people. So much of America's present-day prosperity and advantage can be chalked up to these two egregious acts of theft, neither of which they have remotely adequately compensated for. Obviously you can't return something you stole from some person (people) if you killed him (most of them). And the idea of reparation for slavery has never gained mainstream acceptance. The example this sets is "let's steal with abandon, after all our descedents can play the 'I was no part of that' defense just like present-day Americans". As for (ii), I'm not entirely sure. Has anyone ever looked into just how much money a Chinese company would have to pay if it were to fully comply with intellectual property laws? I find it hard to imagine it not being just as exhorbitant as Springer, Kluwer etc, in many cases.
- Dylan16807 8y agoI can solve your dilemma easily. Don't use the phrase "Intellectual Property". Use "copyright" and "trade secret" to refer to those two separate concepts. "Chinese theft of intellectual property" is all about trade secrets, something completely unrelated to copyright. (There's also a distinction between violating copyright for yourself, and violating copyright to sell copies of something, but I don't think you meant bootlegging so we don't need to address that right now.)
- jancsika 8y agoWere the contents turned into what is now Scihub? Or put in a torrent that currently has seeders? If the answer to both questions is "no" then the md5 of my response is 0646520533421d268d918384b0980da6
- armitron 8y agoThe article claims: "There is no legal nor illegal alternative to it as of today." That is absolutely not true. Libgen and Scihub have been with us for years, massively eclipse library.nu on content, and do not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Moreover a cursory look over their operational TTPs definitely shows competence and familiarity with best practices (unlike library.nu) which I guess explains why they're still going strong.
- userbinator 8y ago"Today" as in 2014, possibly Libgen/Scihub were not yet as well known nor large at the time. AvaxHome is another lesser-known Russian one, but I suspect all the material eventually ends up in Libgen.
- unixhero 8y agoDoes AvaxHome still operate? Noice! I helped me immensely during my days in academia.
- sandov 8y agoAs an avid user of libgen.io, I would not be able to express my sadness if it shut down.
- notatoad 8y agoLibgen seems to have plenty of mirrors - if there's one good thing about high profile shutdowns like library.nu or what.cd it's that it tends to distribute these libraries out across more surface and make them harder to kill
- anonymous5133 8y agoI think there are archive copies that can be downloaded in the forum.
- unixhero 8y agoThere were worse "burns" than this. 1M books is now fairly easily obtainable over a 6 month obsessive hunt on the Internet. The real Library Of Alexandria - of Music - was shut down, WHAT.CD . The way everything there was curated, level of quality and global community, is hard to describe, grasp and convey here. It was so good that artists, released their stuff there, first. For free, to get coverage, and it worked.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoThe successor of what.cd have been going well though.
- Biganon 8y agoOnly 30 000 members though, and it's not increasing anymore.
- josh_fyi 8y agoWhat is the difference between libgen.io and b-ok.org? They both seem to be in the Library Genesis family yet not just mirrors of each other -- for example, there are some books that I can find on b-ok.org but not by libgen.io.
- joel_ms 8y agoThe damage done to human culture by our current copyright enforcement regime is heartbreaking. We have to means to make human cultural output accessible to unprecedented numbers of people around the world, but we don't, largely because it would interrupt the flow of money to incumbent rent-seekers.
- blueboo 8y agoeither that, or the copyright enforcement regime has lifted human creativity to unprecedented heights because of the financial protection it afforded, while simultaneously encouraging people to create original work rather than clinging to derivative trend-chasing.
- kirushik 8y ago> encouraging people to create original work rather than clinging to derivative trend-chasing. Which is opposite of what I observe when studying what my local cinemas have to offer me. (Given that movie industry is enjoying copyright protections the most, and that it's arguably the most-grossing of all.)
- DoctorOetker 8y agoimagine sci-hub is intimidated out of business some date in the future... we would come to regret not making backups, but the size is too large at least 60+TB last I checked. Let's say 60GB were feasible for an average individual. So now we need a decentralized way to ensure we have division of responsibility. How do we divide the labor? Suppose everyone downloads all the articles for which the hash converted to decimal modulo (3 * 365) equals the user's ((birthyear % 3) * 365+birthday) Then if a few ten thousand participate, we'd have a backup Something crazy I didn't know, in the article: >In France, on January 13, 1535, a law was enacted (at the request of the Catholic Church) which forced the closure of all bookshops and stipulated death penalty by hanging for anybody using a printing press.
- cmrx64 8y agohttp://iabak.archiveteam.org/ http://iabak.archiveteam.org/
- lentan1029 8y agoshhh... http://sci-hub.tw http://sci-hub.tw