9 ms·

What bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I run into several headaches, and

by cik 3y ago

What bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I run into several headaches, and it's no longer feasible to buy books. * Amazon shut off bookdepository.com * Amazon.com just won't ship many books here. * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here. * Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here. * Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library. Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books. The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.

scrum-treats 3y ago
Here, try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656.
bookpeople 3y ago
Hi Cik If there was a service that caters to you for buying books, would you use the service?
brink 3y ago
Could be an opportunity for a business?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  The how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows what other terms they can come up with. I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Yeah, it's stupid. Copyright industry pretty much defeats itself with their licensing nonsense that nobody cares about. Anything short of everything humanity has ever created in one place at negligible costs fails to compete with copyright infringement.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  From the perspective of a consumer, the only real difference between a library and zlib is that "checkouts" aren't time-limited. So why aren't there any good, copyright-respecting digital libraries out there? The simple answer is that publishers either completely prohibit library usage of their ebooks, or have such onerous licensing terms that libraries can't afford to maintain large collections [1]. [1] https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702 https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702
internetter 3y ago
I also pirate things. Often. I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy. Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home. I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the book, I guess. And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I pirated it, then decided to buy it. It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just not to pay. [0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being-updated-automatically-with-censored-versions https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being... Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the book and credits the ebook my account. Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago
  The same can be said for the absolutely awful way that "smart" tvs work these days. A friend of mine has a "smart" tv and pays over $400 a month for cable tv and a huge variety of streaming services in order to watch all the things he wants to watch. Many times we have tried (and failed) to navigate the dizzying array of networks and services in an attempt to watch a game or a fight that should be legitimately able to watch due to his paid subscriptions, only to give up and end up pirating it because it was unavailable and/or too much of a hassle.
PentelicoMarble 3y ago
[flagged]
- zapdrive 3y ago
  [flagged]
- justin66 3y ago
  Without wanting to kick off what I bet would be a really great political argument involving the Israel/Palestine problem, I just want to point out that story is fourteen years old. The situation regarding importing books to Gaza might be better or worse after fourteen years but I doubt if it's the same.
- rafaelrc 3y ago
  > 2009 Did you just search for "Israel books" and copied the link for the first negative looking article for free political karma?
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Given gaza's border with Egypt I'm not really sure it matters what israel bans no?
masfuerte 3y ago
Doesn't Israel have bookshops?
- cik 3y ago
  Indeed - and I purchase all of my Hebrew books and magazines there. If we're lucky the chains will bring in ~50 English books per quarter, and eventually sell them all off. These 50 books are usually ~5 Harry Potter, ~10 kid fantasy, and a random smattering of other things. They will not special order. I can actually order a book on Amazon, to a drop shipper in the US, DHS it to Israel for less than the price of special ordering the book here, via צומת ספרים, assuming they even want to allow the special order. Suffice it to say people don't try. There are two English book stores in the country (and a French one) that will go out of their way to work with you. They run into the geographic frustrations put in place by publishers. It's a mess.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Just like any country with an official language other than English, I would expect them to have bookstores full of Hebrew books, with a small section of English books that you've probably already read. The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst English and French speakers living here".
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    any half decent bookstore will just order the books for you and you'll get them a few days later. It's how I buy most of my English books in a non-English speaking country. Added benefit, weans yourself off the 'i have to have it now' shopping culture
    - toyg 3y ago
      "Added benefit, you are forced to do this thing that I think is fashionable, while I don't have to (and likely will continue not to).” In Italy we'd say armiamoci e partite, "we'll get ammo and you'll go fight".
dilap 3y ago
Yeah, I started out buying stuff. The DRM eventually inevitably fucks up and steals the item from me. Fuck it, they've failed to uphold their end of the bargain -- now I pirate, unless there is DRM-free content available for purchase.
- iudqnolq 3y ago
  If you wanted you could also purchase and strip DRM. All the big ones are cracked.
  - DANmode 3y ago
    Or purchase and pirate, which covers your morals in most cases, and puts the burden on proving your hash doesn't match your license.
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
> * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here. Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can do is change the Billing Information on your account so that your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info. But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that have used this method). It should go through and purchase the book. The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.
- toyg 3y ago
  The point is that you should not have to hack your way through this or that payment system, because sooner or later the hack will be blocked and you will lose access even to stuff you paid for. It's not even a hypothetical, the parent poster brings clear examples of this happening multiple times.
SN76477 3y ago
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell
- mmh0000 3y ago
  This quote is incredibly true for me. I used to (like 2 decades ago) pirate everything. Then Steam came along, and it is just so easy to buy things, and I don't have to worry about malware keygens or no-cd hacks. I haven't pirated a game since 2005. I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.
  - smegger001 3y ago
    pretty much. the only game I have pirated in the last 10 years are some had bought several decades ago for windows 95/98 and are ones that are not available on steam or GOG that I had the CD/floppy disk for but my laptop doesn't have a drive for either and would require a no-disc crack to run anyway. Essentially abandonware that no one seems to even know who own the IP for me to give my money to or if they do don't care to bother making it available for me to pay them.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  It is! Steam is great service and makes me gladly pay for games without any qualms.
  - internetter 3y ago
    Amazing what understanding this simple concept can do for your platform
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  It's so true. In the case where price actually is the issue, then it ceases to be a piracy problem, since they likely couldn't afford to pay anyway. No customer lost in many cases.
YeBanKo 3y ago
Did Amazon remove your “purchases” from your device simply because you no longer have a US card??
akvadrako 3y ago
I don't understand why you can't use libgen, which has quite an extensive collection. Why only Z-library?
- rabite 3y ago
  Z-Library has more books. Z-Library contains every book within Libgen plus books that have been uploaded by Z-Library's userbase and never made it to Libgen. Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.
- jraby3 3y ago
  Way more books in z-library. When Z goes down it’s painful to go back to libgen.
kennend3 3y ago
Adding to this, region restrictions on video content. There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in the US? In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another subscription? There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"? After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect people would do?
- Spoom 3y ago
  In my experience, usually Prime content is on Crave in Canada. But a whole lot of Canada just has a pirate Kodi box anyway.
- jdougan 3y ago
  To be fair, that is probably partially fallout from the Canadian content regulations and possibly other law regarding corporate ownership. Not sure because it has been over two decades since I was current in that stuff.
  - transcriptase 3y ago
    They actually just passed a new law last week to legislate even more CanCon meddling on online streaming sites, including YouTube and social media feeds. Canada subsidizes an entertainment industry that mainly produces things nobody wants to watch, so they're regulating companies to algorithmically force it on Canadians. The amazing shows and movies that have come out of Canada in the last 20 years are popular because they're good... not because of some visibility issue with the rest of the fodder from companies that spend more on admin related to lucrative tax breaks and grants than they do actually producing content.
    - jdougan 3y ago
      My impression back then was that the TV cancon rules were a disaster, and the music ones may have helped more than hurt, after the first 10 years or so.
dudul 3y ago
Same for me. I'm not buying books full of DRMs, that I can only read on one specific device and what not. F-that. And since I don't like pirating, I just read books in the public domain.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  Can always do both. Buy a copy and then immediately pirate it. Still fund your author but actually gain the ability to use the thing.
  - dudul 3y ago
    No because I don't want to encourage the distribution model.
crazygringo 3y ago
Why not Library Genesis? Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never contributed additional books in their collection back to Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor. But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?
- internetter 3y ago
  Z-Library is easier to use. I've always struggled to find what I need on libgen. Now we have Anna's Archive[0] though, which is wonderful [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive
pid-1 3y ago
I learned bookbinding, now I print my own books and make pretty hardcovers as a hobby. Highly recommend.
jraby3 3y ago
I also live in Israel and have the same exact problems. I probably spend $5k a year on books but just cannot deal with the headache of trying to purchase a book and failing. VPNs, changing my iTunes Store location, just an absolutely frustrating experience for absolutely no good reason.
reaperducer 3y ago
Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library. Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from my library that it's switching to another system because Overdrive is going out of business.
Nifty3929 3y ago
Honest question: Why does Amazon (and others) restrict or block services in Israel? I'm genuinely curious what their reasoning might be.

by cik 3y ago

scrum-treats 3y ago

Here, try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656.

bookpeople 3y ago

Hi Cik If there was a service that caters to you for buying books, would you use the service?

brink 3y ago

Could be an opportunity for a business?

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
The how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows what other terms they can come up with. I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

Yeah, it's stupid. Copyright industry pretty much defeats itself with their licensing nonsense that nobody cares about. Anything short of everything humanity has ever created in one place at negligible costs fails to compete with copyright infringement.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
From the perspective of a consumer, the only real difference between a library and zlib is that "checkouts" aren't time-limited. So why aren't there any good, copyright-respecting digital libraries out there? The simple answer is that publishers either completely prohibit library usage of their ebooks, or have such onerous licensing terms that libraries can't afford to maintain large collections [1]. [1] https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702 https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702

internetter 3y ago

I also pirate things. Often. I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy. Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home. I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the book, I guess. And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I pirated it, then decided to buy it. It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just not to pay. [0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being-updated-automatically-with-censored-versions https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being... Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the book and credits the ebook my account. Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
The same can be said for the absolutely awful way that "smart" tvs work these days. A friend of mine has a "smart" tv and pays over $400 a month for cable tv and a huge variety of streaming services in order to watch all the things he wants to watch. Many times we have tried (and failed) to navigate the dizzying array of networks and services in an attempt to watch a game or a fight that should be legitimately able to watch due to his paid subscriptions, only to give up and end up pirating it because it was unavailable and/or too much of a hassle.

PentelicoMarble 3y ago

[flagged]

zapdrive 3y ago
[flagged]
justin66 3y ago
Without wanting to kick off what I bet would be a really great political argument involving the Israel/Palestine problem, I just want to point out that story is fourteen years old. The situation regarding importing books to Gaza might be better or worse after fourteen years but I doubt if it's the same.
rafaelrc 3y ago
> 2009 Did you just search for "Israel books" and copied the link for the first negative looking article for free political karma?
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Given gaza's border with Egypt I'm not really sure it matters what israel bans no?

masfuerte 3y ago

Doesn't Israel have bookshops?

cik 3y ago
Indeed - and I purchase all of my Hebrew books and magazines there. If we're lucky the chains will bring in ~50 English books per quarter, and eventually sell them all off. These 50 books are usually ~5 Harry Potter, ~10 kid fantasy, and a random smattering of other things. They will not special order. I can actually order a book on Amazon, to a drop shipper in the US, DHS it to Israel for less than the price of special ordering the book here, via צומת ספרים, assuming they even want to allow the special order. Suffice it to say people don't try. There are two English book stores in the country (and a French one) that will go out of their way to work with you. They run into the geographic frustrations put in place by publishers. It's a mess.
mynameisvlad 3y ago
Just like any country with an official language other than English, I would expect them to have bookstores full of Hebrew books, with a small section of English books that you've probably already read. The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst English and French speakers living here".
- Barrin92 3y ago
  any half decent bookstore will just order the books for you and you'll get them a few days later. It's how I buy most of my English books in a non-English speaking country. Added benefit, weans yourself off the 'i have to have it now' shopping culture
  - toyg 3y ago
    "Added benefit, you are forced to do this thing that I think is fashionable, while I don't have to (and likely will continue not to).” In Italy we'd say armiamoci e partite, "we'll get ammo and you'll go fight".

dilap 3y ago

Yeah, I started out buying stuff. The DRM eventually inevitably fucks up and steals the item from me. Fuck it, they've failed to uphold their end of the bargain -- now I pirate, unless there is DRM-free content available for purchase.

iudqnolq 3y ago
If you wanted you could also purchase and strip DRM. All the big ones are cracked.
- DANmode 3y ago
  Or purchase and pirate, which covers your morals in most cases, and puts the burden on proving your hash doesn't match your license.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

> * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here. Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can do is change the Billing Information on your account so that your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info. But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that have used this method). It should go through and purchase the book. The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.

toyg 3y ago
The point is that you should not have to hack your way through this or that payment system, because sooner or later the hack will be blocked and you will lose access even to stuff you paid for. It's not even a hypothetical, the parent poster brings clear examples of this happening multiple times.

SN76477 3y ago

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

mmh0000 3y ago
This quote is incredibly true for me. I used to (like 2 decades ago) pirate everything. Then Steam came along, and it is just so easy to buy things, and I don't have to worry about malware keygens or no-cd hacks. I haven't pirated a game since 2005. I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.
- smegger001 3y ago
  pretty much. the only game I have pirated in the last 10 years are some had bought several decades ago for windows 95/98 and are ones that are not available on steam or GOG that I had the CD/floppy disk for but my laptop doesn't have a drive for either and would require a no-disc crack to run anyway. Essentially abandonware that no one seems to even know who own the IP for me to give my money to or if they do don't care to bother making it available for me to pay them.
Aardwolf 3y ago
It is! Steam is great service and makes me gladly pay for games without any qualms.
- internetter 3y ago
  Amazing what understanding this simple concept can do for your platform
xboxnolifes 3y ago
It's so true. In the case where price actually is the issue, then it ceases to be a piracy problem, since they likely couldn't afford to pay anyway. No customer lost in many cases.

YeBanKo 3y ago

Did Amazon remove your “purchases” from your device simply because you no longer have a US card??

akvadrako 3y ago

I don't understand why you can't use libgen, which has quite an extensive collection. Why only Z-library?

rabite 3y ago
Z-Library has more books. Z-Library contains every book within Libgen plus books that have been uploaded by Z-Library's userbase and never made it to Libgen. Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.
jraby3 3y ago
Way more books in z-library. When Z goes down it’s painful to go back to libgen.

kennend3 3y ago

Adding to this, region restrictions on video content. There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in the US? In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another subscription? There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"? After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect people would do?

Spoom 3y ago
In my experience, usually Prime content is on Crave in Canada. But a whole lot of Canada just has a pirate Kodi box anyway.
jdougan 3y ago
To be fair, that is probably partially fallout from the Canadian content regulations and possibly other law regarding corporate ownership. Not sure because it has been over two decades since I was current in that stuff.
- transcriptase 3y ago
  They actually just passed a new law last week to legislate even more CanCon meddling on online streaming sites, including YouTube and social media feeds. Canada subsidizes an entertainment industry that mainly produces things nobody wants to watch, so they're regulating companies to algorithmically force it on Canadians. The amazing shows and movies that have come out of Canada in the last 20 years are popular because they're good... not because of some visibility issue with the rest of the fodder from companies that spend more on admin related to lucrative tax breaks and grants than they do actually producing content.
  - jdougan 3y ago
    My impression back then was that the TV cancon rules were a disaster, and the music ones may have helped more than hurt, after the first 10 years or so.

dudul 3y ago

Same for me. I'm not buying books full of DRMs, that I can only read on one specific device and what not. F-that. And since I don't like pirating, I just read books in the public domain.

vorpalhex 3y ago
Can always do both. Buy a copy and then immediately pirate it. Still fund your author but actually gain the ability to use the thing.
- dudul 3y ago
  No because I don't want to encourage the distribution model.

crazygringo 3y ago

Why not Library Genesis? Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never contributed additional books in their collection back to Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor. But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?

internetter 3y ago
Z-Library is easier to use. I've always struggled to find what I need on libgen. Now we have Anna's Archive[0] though, which is wonderful [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive

pid-1 3y ago

I learned bookbinding, now I print my own books and make pretty hardcovers as a hobby. Highly recommend.

jraby3 3y ago

I also live in Israel and have the same exact problems. I probably spend $5k a year on books but just cannot deal with the headache of trying to purchase a book and failing. VPNs, changing my iTunes Store location, just an absolutely frustrating experience for absolutely no good reason.

reaperducer 3y ago

Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library. Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from my library that it's switching to another system because Overdrive is going out of business.

Nifty3929 3y ago

Honest question: Why does Amazon (and others) restrict or block services in Israel? I'm genuinely curious what their reasoning might be.