8 ms·

Z-Library to let users share physical books

• fancymcpoopoo 4y ago
  Wish ppl would keep their mouth shut so we could have one good thing for a year
  • quazar 4y ago
    Sorry
• HopenHeyHi 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • morsch 4y ago
    But everybody knows what a library is and grassroots booksharing (aka drop off your old paperbacks in an agreed upon public place) is already a thing, so maybe not a dystopia? Also, buying books second hand is incredibly easy and cheap. And buying a license for an ebook is incredibly convenient and also tends to be rather cheap.
    • AlotOfReading 4y ago
      Why do you think ebook licensing is cheap? The big 5 all have "metered" licensing, where licenses expire and require repurchase after either a certain period of time or a certain number of checkouts. These are usually set up so that every ebook will have to be repurchased every 1-2 years. Furthermore, ebook prices are usually between 1x-3x the physical list price depending on publisher, date of publication, and popularity.
      • lejalv 4y ago
        Concur. E-book pricing and licensing conditions are so out of tune with the cost of distribution that it is easy to see piracy as a form of protest.
        • morsch 4y ago
          Some physical books cost 3 bucks, new, others are 30, some textbooks 150 USD. Distribution costs have little to do with it. Not that I'm defending predatory textbook pricing, I totally support copying those 150 USD textbooks, whether it's digital or, old school, photocopier copies.
      • morsch 4y ago
        Interesting. It's more like 0.5x to 1x of the paperback in my experience, buying mostly English books on Amazon Germany. Sometimes considerably less, especially for older books, eg I just bought a fantasy trilogy from the 80s for like 2 bucks. And, like I said, real convenient. Also I'm talking about "buying" an ebook as a consumer, the licensing model for libraries might be terrible for all I know. It's certainly still pretty terrible for most library members. I imagine digital lending is terrifying for the publishers.
  • EGreg 4y ago
    Hmm well, the Library of Alexandria is millennia older… but I guess it didn’t lend boox?
  • Dalewyn 4y ago
    A "library" simply refers to a collection of materials.[1] For example in the tech world, the second "L" in DLL stands for Dynamic Link Library, a modular collection of code.[2] There is no implication of lending in the word or concept of a "library" by itself. An explicit example of this are private libraries, libraries held and used by individuals. A public library is a library owned by and operated for the public, aka the people, and as a library of the people the people can take (and must return) books from the public library. This is where the common concept of "borrowing books from the library" comes from. [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/library https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/library [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/deployment/dynamic-link-library https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-clien...
    • hkt 4y ago
      Private membership libraries predated public libraries in most places bt by well over two centuries and often loaned. It was actually more common for people to share a library and borrow from than to accrue their own, as the cost of books was considerable. For more on this, I'll cite the following: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/303 https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/303 Available from all good lending libraries, shadow libraries, and academic bookshops!
  • TMWNN 4y ago
    >I think if people feel the need to explain the concept of a library and this is some shadowy samizdat notion now we might as well give up all pretense like we aren't in a dystopia. The author is being sarcastic. He knows very well that everyone knows what a (book) library is. How can you not tell that by "a few hundred years old already"?
  • matwood 4y ago
    I wish they would have done a bit more research and explanation here. Book lending it not new, but the focus on best sellers is rather recent. Libraries spend a majority of their ebook budget on best sellers which is unfortunate.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• toyg 4y ago
  The copyright police will fall on this like a ton of bricks. Publishers already hate libraries (yes they do), the last thing they want is more of them.
  • zem 4y ago
    but on what legal grounds can they object to shipping around physical books?
  • morsch 4y ago
    This has been a thing for decades, nobody cares. It doesn't scale to a size that warrants their attention. Not that there's much the publishing industry could do about it if they wanted to. Apart from leaning stronger into ebooks, where people can't do this. But as it stands that'd mean giving Amazon even more power and money.
  • labster 4y ago
    At this point publishers should just revoke the licenses to all physical books and burn them, so we can prevent this kind of rampant copyright abuse.
  • galaxyLogic 4y ago
    I don't understand why they should hate libraries. Libraries get people hooked on books, then they start buying them. At least that's what happened to me. Libraries typically have a limited length you can keep the books before you must return them. If you really like the book then you will want to buy it.
    • suddenclarity 4y ago
      The don't. Libraries are a huge money source for publishers. Libraries and publisher's do disagree about the payment model for ebooks but it doesn't mean they hate them. Far from.
  • matwood 4y ago
    Hate is the wrong word. Publishers and libraries have a complicated, sometimes antagonistic relationship. It's also important to understand that 'publishers' are not homogenous. Outside of the big 4/5, many publishers love and go out of their way to support libraries. The issue is that the relationship is asymmetric. Even though publishers make good money from libraries, libraries need publishers more than publishers need them right now. IMO, libraries need to continue to move beyond being only thought of as places to read the latest NYT best seller list for free.
• blackoil 4y ago
  What we need is a library that focuses only on out of print out difficult to get books. We don't need Harry Potter and likes on it. There are a million legal/illegal ways to get them.
  • andai 4y ago
    Gutenberg? At least, if it's old enough!
    • hkt 4y ago
      Not everything though. There are some books I've only ever found through antiquarian shops and private libraries (eg http://londonlibrary.co.uk/ http://londonlibrary.co.uk/ ) which are of historical and cultural value but which will probably never be digitised. Unless I do it, anyway. There's also a whole world of professional texts in law and other subjects which I've had to access by taking the £200 train down to London to physically sit in the British Library and read (and often, photograph). The more interesting the thing you're doing, the more likely it is that you'll need to venture to an actual library, often one of considerable age. That's not even to mention the historical archives etc, indexes of which are held centrally but the materials are scattered all over.
      • beej71 4y ago
        I'm amazed at both what I can find and what I can't find at Anna's Archive. Part of me dies inside when rare books like that become effectively dead due to loss. It sucks when the copyright holders would prefer that to letting the book be free, but what possible incentive could they have for freeing a book?
        • andai 4y ago
          >what possible incentive could they have for freeing a book? Free PR? :) That sounds like the sort of thing that would get a lot of attention and goodwill, and maybe even some new loyal customers.
  • 4y ago
• leobg 4y ago
  They should just make it easier for people to scan books. Or give incentives. Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Or just get people to upload photos from the backs of the books in their library. Then extract from those the titles. Match them up against books that are missing in the digital library and are being requested by users. Then send a message to the owner and ask them to scan this particular book. Give an incentive based on both the number of requests and the speed of uploading the scan. Could even allow requesters to set their own rewards. “I’d be willing to pay X to get this book scanned before Tuesday”.
  • codetrotter 4y ago
    > Why mail physical books around when all you need is their content? Because physically mailing books is not copyright infringement. Physically mailing books provides a legal way of sharing the contents of books with more people.
    • leobg 4y ago
      Sure. But they already run a piracy site, don’t they? The cost and delay of shipping are what drives many people to piracy in the first place, I would argue. If I can have a book for $5 in two days as a used physical copy from Amazon, for $20 now as ebook from the publisher, or for free right now from a piracy site, the choice is obvious.
    • kristopolous 4y ago
      Well we need to change copyright then. I really only care about out of print and rare materials. Passing around a book through the mail that's been out of print for 80 years is rather dangerous when you care about its preservation. For some reason we legally treat these as identical to some mass market paperback trade of say diary of a wimpy kid and that's stupid. If we care about research, preservation of materials, having them available for future generations, then really, the sacred holy protection of copyright can take a hike when dealing with those texts. I frequently have to get on planes and fly off to University special collections and sit in some special room where I can't bring in a camera and have to carefully read through something that can't be digitized because we're somehow not smart enough to see a difference between that and a Dan Brown novel you get at the grocery store. Pisses me off. Holistically speaking, what the fuck are we doing? This stuff shouldn't be special and precious. We've had photography for over 180 years, this isn't some strange new phenomena here. I should be able to browse such documents from the same bed I'm lying in now writing these words, not book a plane to fly across country because librarians are justifiably paranoid about some asshole copyright lawyers.
• black_puppydog 4y ago
  A similar project, but without the copyright lawsuits entangled, is inventaire.io
  • _a9 4y ago
    Open source too https://github.com/inventaire/ https://github.com/inventaire/
• qavalier 4y ago
  information must be free man
• shaman1 4y ago
  London has a number of red telephone kiosks turned into libraries. I belive they are administered by local groups which move the stock around once in a while but I would suspect it's difficult to manage this online since there is no check-in/check-out process.
  • martyvis 4y ago
    It sounds like the Street Library project here in Australia. Every little suburb and village now has multiple little enclosures that basically encourage to people to put in a book they have finished reading and take if they want. All grass roots driven and seems to work well with very little abuse.https://streetlibrary.org.au/ https://streetlibrary.org.au/
    • bitwize 4y ago
      Little Free Libraries are the USA equivalent: https://littlefreelibrary.org https://littlefreelibrary.org My wife has constructed, and contributed to, a few of these. I see them around town, even in residential areas; and, as you say, there is almost no vandalism or abuse.
      • patcon 4y ago
        You might be interested in how Little Free Library has been taken over by a misguided board of directors https://nothingintherulebook.com/2019/11/15/listen-to-the-people-little-free-library-organisation-in-dispute-with-movements-founding-family/ https://nothingintherulebook.com/2019/11/15/listen-to-the-pe...
        • emptybits 4y ago
          LittleFreeLibrary.org applied for trademark control of “wooden boxes with a storage area for books”. Additionally, LittleFreeLibrary.org now stakes claim to word variations beyond their trademarked name “Little Free Library”, such as “little library” and “little libraries”. From a beautiful idea in 2009 to these terrible ideas now. :-(
• assimpleaspossi 4y ago
  It seems you now have to create an account to download anything. Or am I using the wrong link?
  • Gatsky 4y ago
    Seems so, although it says here [1] you can just email them for a link. [1] https://singlelogin.me/blog/39 https://singlelogin.me/blog/39
    • _a9 4y ago
      You should be able to create an account on that domain here (unless something has changed since I last registered) https://singlelogin.me/registration.php https://singlelogin.me/registration.php You get your own personal domain/subdomain of zlibrary after logging in
• sharpener 4y ago
  Some thoughts... On the connected question of why human societies accelerated their development over time (recently posted on HN) a couple of comments are pertinent (see [0] and [1]). If one values the continued acceleration of human development (in all its expanding pluralities) then there is a strong case for something like Z-lib to exist for a lot of factual or science-generated information being available for everyone. For such texts, I would guess that what the library contains could lag behind the commercial publication front by 5-10 years without appreciable profit loss to the publishing companies, nor significant losses to the estates of individuals who created them. And taking away some of their back catalogue might actually reduce publishers' running costs... (Ask: Can anyone else on HN put hard numbers to this?) The debate seems similar to the one regarding taxation vs. inflation rate rises. Governments are currently choosing to raise inflation rates because that doesn't impede trade flows as much as some potential friction coming from moving money through a government bureaucracy for some cause. The particular cause matters, but the choice is about efficiency in essence. The same with Z-lib, as I see it. A Z-lib type free digital library could raise global efficiency in all sorts of areas, but the argument will only pass if various forms of extortive-because-looking-very-obsolete-now old capitalist inefficiences can be demonstrated to be such. Lots of publishing companies are probably holding on to old titles that for them are already digital landfill in their archives. Maybe they just need to see that clearly. The other catch is that the "for everyone" phrase implies a representative global stakeholder is needed for it to "get legal". UN.org/z-lib anyone? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35493797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35493797 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495511
• thoughtsbykean 4y ago
  Where did this idea come from? The need for a project due to expansion of a team, or did the expansion of the team lead to the need for a new project?
• infoseek12 4y ago
  I wonder if the benefits of having physical copies of books will outweigh the expense, difficulty, and risk/exposure of running a miniature version of Amazons logistics network.
• shaky-carrousel 4y ago
  This is not new: https://www.bookcrossing.com/ https://www.bookcrossing.com/
• causality0 4y ago
  Z-Library envisions a book 'sharing' market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe. Has this ever worked out? By "this" I mean some online entity that's only or mostly involved in less than legal activities saying they're going to launch some massive real-world project? I feel like it's less a way to accomplish something in the real world or even to generate press attention, but actually just self-fueling hype. The non-legal project is manned by mostly unpaid activists, who are motivated by a shared philosophy, which must be driven by willpower. That will to continue on is bolstered by hype, and these announcements are a way to self-generate hype.
• UncleEntity 4y ago
  > According to Z-Library, users will be able to send books by mail. These can then be loaned by others and/or sent by mail when requested. Like the old e-tree where they would send someone a CD, they’d make a copy and send it on to the next person. Never actually used it because by the time I got into the jam bands I already had good enough internets to just download stuff but it was still operational circa 1999 — guessing for folks without broadband.