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“Most notorious” illegal shadow library (LibGen) sued by textbook publishers
- bvan 3y agoNo sympathy for textbook publishers at all.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoAny sympathy for authors?
- gaganyaan 3y agoYou're right, we need to think of the authors and destroy public libraries, those leeches
- musicale 3y agoIIRC one CS/EE textbook author (Dave Patterson I think) said he made more money selling a $9.99 self-published Kindle textbook on Amazon (at 70% royalty for ebooks under $10) than he did from a full-priced hardcover (currently $77) through a traditional publisher (Morgan Kaufman presumably.)
- raincole 3y agoUh... So? What does this information tell us about LibGen case? The author could've just released the book free online and "free the information"(like what LibGen does, according to HN comments). However he chose to self-publish on Amazon at $9.99. There must be some reason, right? Perhaps the author actually desires monetary compensation more than he desires to set his information free? A very devilish idea, I know.
- pritambaral 3y ago> So? What does this information tell us about LibGen case? It's pretty clear: that publishers do not fairly compensate authors.
- raincole 3y agoAnd uploading their works on LibGen do. Got it.
- pritambaral 3y agoIf you have to put words in my mouth, could you at least try to make them good? The correct way to read your the parent comment of your original comment in this thread is: Pirating a self-published book hurts authors far more than pirating books sold by a publisher. Because publishers pay pittances to authors.
- beej71 3y agoTons. All they need to do is give me a way to pay them directly. Venmo or PayPal would be great.
- musicale 3y agoPretty much this. I'd happily pay the author $7 for a PDF rather than $70 for a DRM-encumbered Kindle ebook (or $31 to "rent" it for a term.)
- sombragris 3y agoIn the field I work there's the practice in Spanish language publishers of publishing a print run of a certain amount of copies, and then let it fall out of print with no reprints whatsoever. And no e-book formats. Want to purchase a copy? Sorry, no luck. Not even print-on-demand for ya. Or, you want to read your ebook in Linux, but the publisher puts DRM on it with a stupid Digital Editions which forces you to install hostile software with a crappy UI on Windows for the privilege of reading what you have already purchased. I'd say go libgen, go ahead!! For such cases, libgen is a godsend.
- CrimsonCape 3y agoDo state universities have the right to create agreements with the big publishers, the faculty, and the university book stores to essentially lock the knowledge behind a private paywall? Anything taught in a state university should be open-source, full stop.
- Ar-Curunir 3y agoLibgen has done more for learning, education, and research than these textbook publishers have ever done.
- mouse_ 3y agowe must beg our vampire overlords for fairer living conditions
- ykonstant 3y agoThe 21st century: the time of "notorious illegal shadow" libraries, full of copyrighted documentation of publicly funded research.
- refurb 3y agoTextbooks aren't publicly funded research. And writing a brief summary of publcly funded research is actually new content. It's a massive stretch trying to tie publicly funded research to this.
- musicale 3y agoSci-Hub is more like the library of publicly funded research. And of course it is similarly pursued.
- refurb 3y agoSure, but at least the arguments there have more merit. Trying to use the same arguments for textbooks falls flat.
- chaxor 3y agoResearchers often write book chapters in the same day along side their research papers, so it's not like these arethat different. Effectively they're similar to review articles. Still mostly publicly funded.
- refurb 3y agoIf someone write about a topic and produces new content, that is not the same as publishing publicly funded research. People wouldn't read review articles otherwise.
- HybridCurve 3y ago> Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. There was a time when I would buy books without being able to review all of the content. That stopped several years ago after buying two textbooks (one from McGraw Hill, another Pearson) that were so awful I returned them. They were both full of absolutely horrid page layouts with huge margins full of irrelevant information, just absolute garbage. I don't think they are losing money because their content is being distributed for free, but rather it just has little to no value and is not worth investment.
- seeknotfind 3y agoThe textbook is bigger, so it must be better, right?
- jmspring 3y agoHave to rejigger that white space so that schools can require a new version the next year rather than people using used text books.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- musicale 3y agoPublishers work so hard to impose the limitations of paper on digital libraries. I realize they're doing it to preserve their business model, but it shouldn't be at the expense of destroying a modern library of alexandria. The benefit to humanity of a global digital library is too great.
- suprjami 3y agoSounds like the "Head First" series of books, which have such scattered layouts they make a Japanese newspaper look sane.
- brnaftr361 3y agoThis, so much this. And these have been the two main publishers I've had to deal with. And all the course content is structured around their organizational modality because the professors just dump their slide decks in lecture, except naturally much of the nuance is lost so, necessarily, one must have the book. However, I won't pay for it because I'm not going to support rent seeking that is totally degenerate, but I do get it free. And even overlooking the dreadful formatting, the writing is often bad. This was especially true if the mathematics textbooks I've had to deal with.
- sunflowerfly 3y agoCongress needs to address the textbook oligopoly.
- smeej 3y agoSeems to me like Libgen is "addressing" it better than Congress will, and at lower cost.
- akomtu 3y agoThe age when criminals wear suits and are empowered by the law, while the few good guys left have to hide in the catacombs.
- 15457345234 3y agoIt's a bit of a doomer mentality but it's hard not to agree with you sometimes. Welcome to reality, deposit coins to retain your oxygen supply. Do you want to keep living? Better get ready to pay pay pay. If you don't want to die now, you will soon. Do you want to die? Ok, now that's perfect. The street is right there, just sit on it and beg and someone will give you your hotshot shortly. No need to pay, free to all, first come first served.
- musicale 3y agoYou're not exactly wrong since living requires air, air requires space, and space is rented. Same for food, health care, etc.
- ftxbro 3y agoyikes we got some pitchforks in this comment section
- blooalien 3y agoI prefer torches. Cleanse it with fire!
- goku12 3y agoAnybody here without a pitchfork here is someone who hasn't gone to a university, a college or self-taught.
- EvgeniyZh 3y agoI guess US university? I barely needed LibGen during my undergrad. Either lecture notes, free resources only, or physical library were sufficient most of the time. Definitely no "we use edition X, you have to buy it" bullshit. As a grad student I find that many relevant books (e.g., Springer) are available via uni subscription, or some pre-print version is available for free. Libgen is useful and textbook publishers are nuts, but educational organizations are enabling them and they could do that less, surely for below-grad-level material
- goku12 3y agoI graduated from an Indian university. This situation was better, but not significantly. The syllabus is mostly adapted from US universities and generally prescribes the same textbooks. These US books are exorbitantly costly in Indian currency (due to difference in purchase power parity), so many books have cheaper prints exclusive to the Indian subcontinent. They are still costly and there are books that don't have a cheap edition. It's often outside the budget of students. Libraries help - but there aren't enough copies for all students. This problem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there are books by local authors designed around the syllabus with the semester exams in focus. Those books are more similar to lecture notes. My experience though, is that those books are mostly good only for rote learning. You need to refer the prescribed textbooks to get any reasonable insight. And then there are books not in syllabus that offer much deeper insight. So - the situation is better than in US, but not significantly. On a tangent, the tendency of Indian universities adopting syllabus from its US counterparts leads to use of proprietary software like Matlab. Software companies in US supply student version of their software and often tie up with the university to get it into the syllabus. But its much harder for Indian students to access the same software. Some universities have identified this problem and have recently started prescribing open source software like Julia and KiCad.
- arandomhuman 3y agoThe word "shadow library" was dropped quite a few times in this. I hate how terminology like this is used to frame discussions in favor of the publishers. At the end of the day, this is just a simple matter of exchanging information over the internet, which should be free.
- swayvil 3y agoIt's like calling file-sharing "piracy". A guy with a PhD in marketing made a pretty penny off that one. Bullshit is so common now. We need to take a stand against it.
- musicale 3y agoAccording to wikipedia, the usage dates back centuries.
- mkl 3y agoWikipedia refers to this 1736 dictionary page: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_030pPyvwS9MC/page/n620/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_030pPyvwS9MC/page/n620/mo... No marketing PhDs involved, but it probably had the same intention behind it: equating copyright infringement with horrific lawless violence and theft to try to turn people against it.
- musicale 3y agoSince pirates were routinely hanged in the 18th century, presumably there was a desire to apply the same punishment for copyright infringement.
- lolinder 3y agoI assumed the same thing as you, but I recently was made aware that the term had already been in circulation for centuries to refer to copyright violation. 1668 is the earliest entry in my OED for this usage: > 1668 J. Hancock Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies...
- nostril 3y agoHi all. I would like your help with an ethics problem. I run a site called The Nose, a safe haven for AI training data. It operates overseas in a region out of reach of DMCAs. (Past info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512147) This was necessary because I felt it was unacceptable for entire datasets to be forced offline by one lawyer. The ethical problem is that I'm sympathetic with people who want to remove their content from AI training data. I received an email from the Danish Rights Alliance about Books3: https://pastebin.com/6qw3yMWZ https://pastebin.com/6qw3yMWZ They point out that this is illegal in Denmark and elsewhere, and threaten to ban thenose.cc from Denmark. Obviously, the threats are meaningless. But I'm interested in your views on whether we should comply with the request by removing the specific titles they list. I was thinking of saying "If you say 'please', I will remove the listed titles." There are 109 entries, so it wouldn't be too much hassle to just remove those from the tarball, and it would be amusing to force a lawyer to ask nicely. For now, I asked for a complete list of the full filenames they want to be removed, along with proof that they represent the listed rightsholders. I'm more interested in how you feel. It seems reasonable to let people opt out of training. We could formalize this process by setting up a way to do this. We could also just ignore takedown demands. What do you think?
- 19h 3y agoMake those files torrents and I’ll make sure your data will transcend into the unenforceable infinities of the internet.
- nostril 3y agoOne other question: Is there legal basis in Denmark for asking for proof that they control the copyright for the listed works? DMCAs operate on "good-faith belief, under penalty of perjury" but in international situations it becomes trickier. If anyone knows of a Danish lawyer I could consult with, or someone versed in international affairs, please let me know. (Or if you care to contribute funding. Hosting costs around $140/mo right now, which isn't free, but paying for consultation is costlier.)
- rmbyrro 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 3y agoI see little difference between LibGen and a public library. And as we all know, and have known for millennia, the public library benefits us hugely.
- goku12 3y agoThese publishers see public libraries the same way they see libgen. They would have called them illegal and shut them down if libraries weren't an established and reputed public institution. They will still try to delegitimize them over time. All the more a reason for us to not let them start with libgen.
- walterbell 3y agoOther than freemium/marketing tiers, are there examples of payment being decoupled from distribution? One HN example was the Rails Tutorial. A successful programming book only earns low five figures. The early versions of Rails Tutorial, where most of the content was free to read online without registration, earned mid six figures in revenue from paid ebooks (same content as the public material) and bonus videos. Looks like the most recent version is subscription-only.
- mquander 3y agoIt's frustrating to me that if this journalist was writing about what e.g. Donald Trump said, they would feel morally compelled to do a bunch of fact checking, so that they can also print that the stuff he said is wrong and bad. But when they write this, they just copy and paste all the shit the publishers write about how libgen is a "thieves' den" and "massively illegal" and that companies should do the "right thing" to shut down the "serious harm." Zero push back, zero interrogation. It would be nice to at least have a sentence in there like, you know, "Conversely, Professor Joe Schmoe, who uses pirate libraries daily in the course of his work researching cures for sick puppies, says that it's good that people can download textbooks and read them, and hopes that the publishers are unable to destroy people's ability to do so."
- underlipton 3y agoThis seems to be common in contemporary journalism, most notoriously in "crime reporting" that is often just rewritten press releases from the police. Trump is an interesting point of comparison; my recollection is that it took years for mainstream outlets to treat his statements with skepticism. There was a period where calling his bald-faced lies "lies" was a hotly-contested ethical issue. Unfortunately, journalism is not free of bias towards the particular incentives that the writers, editors, and publishers are subject to.
- zamadatix 3y agoI recently decided to go take some classes at the local college and I honestly can't fathom why the large publishers listed in the article even care anymore. The days where downloading the book mean you can skip the publisher seem to be largely disappearing with the subscription also including coursework that integrates into the lesson plans themselves. I use LibGen to download all of my textbooks but not because the publishers get anything less, it just enables me to actually have a usable form of the book to read and search though. Even if they can manage to make it hard enough to stop that, there is still no actual gain for them out of it. Calling it a notorious illegal shadow library makes it sound a hell of a lot cooler than how I put it though.
- musicale 3y ago> the subscription also including coursework that integrates into the lesson plans themselves Mandatory publisher-licensed courseware is the ultimate DRM, and it's an abusive scam. Instructors, please do not yield to this temptation.
- whimsicalism 3y agoidk i was able to libgen my way through a college physics degree not so far in the past
- fastneutron 3y agoIt’s impossible to even get a sense of a textbook’s content from the so-called “previews” that you find on Amazon, Google Books, and the publisher’s’ websites. I prefer print, so I’ll happily pay if the content is good, but just letting me see the preface, contents, index and maybe a few pages of chapter 1 isn’t enough for me to discern that. Libgen at least lets me see what I might be getting. Libgen is also great for books that are long out of print, and the authors long dead. It’s a crime against humanity that these works are locked up by our archaic copyright laws, for things that have long since ceased to be remotely profitable for the publisher.
- stainablesteel 3y agofor the same reason why outright banning 'under the table' parts of an economy would actually destroy that economy, there's a lot of good that having these free books accessible directly accounts for the publishers who want to destroy this are essentially forcing a slowdown of information transfer and, ironically, would devalue these books in general i wouldn't buy anything that i can't preview because i've seen too much garbage that i know isn't worth paying for, especially coming from elselvier
- musicale 3y agoI can't help but wonder if unlicensed copies of Windows and Office helped cement Microsoft's dominance. Maybe Linux/FOSS advocates should advocate for better and more restrictive DRM. ;-)
- goku12 3y agoThere are two things that helped cement Windows and Office. First was their dominance among OEMs. They were either bundled with the hardware, or the hardware had drivers only for Windows. The second was that the alternatives weren't as good at the time. It's much easier to get Linux working these days. It's more user friendly too. But that wasn't the case two decades ago. On the other hand, the conveniences of non-DRM ebooks, open formats like epub and the whole free software ecosystem is way beyond anything that the proprietary DRM-encumbered solutions have to offer. At least for me, that's enough to not even consider buying ebooks with DRM. I don't know why anyone would prefer a stricter version of the dystopia we are in.
- lolinder 3y ago> "The Libgen sites deprive plaintiffs and their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and plaintiffs’ works, and may cause plaintiffs to cease publishing certain works." This line was clearly not written for anyone who's ever been through college. I, for one, would love to see the textbook market devalued. The abusive practices employed by these publishers are thoroughly reprehensible. When I was in college my physics professor had us use a Newtonian physics textbook published by Pearson (one of the plaintiffs) that was then in its 14th edition. He asked us to buy the 13th instead because it was affordable ($30 instead of $200), and he provided question mappings to the 12th edition, since the only thing that changed from the 12th to the 13th was the order of the questions. If Pearson is really so worried about the textbook market becoming devalued, they should consider letting up on their abuse of college students. It's pretty much inevitable that faced with five $200 textbooks students are going to look for alternatives that don't involve paying Pearson what they think they are owed.
- metadat 3y agoFor decades, Pearson failed to invest and innovate in their market segment. Let them pay the market price -- It's only fair.
- pseudo0 3y agoTheir new trick is online assignments with automatic grading. The access code for the assignment system will be something like $230 alone, or $250 bundled with the textbook. Departments save a few bucks on grading and pass on the costs to the students. It's a pretty gross business model.
- anakaine 3y agoDepartments need to be helped to account by the student body. If your pricing is correct, and we are talking about a major 1st year class with 250 people, that's $57,500 for the privilege of issuing and marking assignments per session. For it to be saleable to departments I bet most assignments are already in the system and you just check off which one to issue. It's academic laziness at the expense of the students. The uni makes more money by saving on the cost of tutors to mark assignments in those bulk classes whilst the students are charged more. Its a gross financial abrogation of responsibility for the welfare of their students.
- eulgro 3y agoWhat good do they think this will do? Literally thousands of people have backups of the whole database and content, there's an uncountable number of mirrors and torrents are widely available. And as the article says, LibGen operators are basically untraceable and don't exist outside of the Internet.
- toastercat 3y agoLibGen is amazing. Used it throughout college and saved so much money, I would use it again without question. My favorite part about it (aside from being free) is that the experience through LibGen is somehow superior to the legitimate $200-$300 alternative of purchasing the textbook and a DRM-riddled CD/PDF. You just download a lightweight 10MB PDF you can carry around on your USB drive, or view on your personal Dropbox! There was a quote by Marcin Iwiński from CD Projekt, something to the effect of "if the guy who pirates your game gets a better experience than the guy who bought your game legally, there is something seriously wrong."
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago> Marcin Iwiński from CD Projekt CDPR essentially started up as an English -> Polish localisation company before it first released The Witcher. A lot of that localisation and lack of support from official (Western) publishers meant that they had to resort to a bit of piracy here and there. Ergo 'CD' Projekt.
- nlh 3y agoLook, I know what copyright law says and I know that LibGen is probably and actually illegal and that authors are entitled to payment and all that stuff. Heck I come from a family of authors so I get it. But man, can you imagine being the guy quoted in that article calling an open library - whose only goal is to spread knowledge - a "thieves' den" of illegal books"? Talk about being on the wrong side of enlightenment.
- goku12 3y agoI'm pretty sure authors would get a better deal if they cut off these middlemen. I always buy directly from the author if I can. Not only is it cheaper when that option is available, but the authors often take a pro-reader stance - like no DRM. There are a few small scale publishers like leanpub that do something similar. The exploitative practices in the publishing can stop if both authors and readers take a proactive stance in it.
- martin8412 3y agoA lot of the authors get close to nothing. I had a professor who wrote the text book used for the course. He said that he didn't care if people pirated it, because he got something like $1.5 per sale. We could just buy him a beer if we wanted.
- flir 3y agoWas thinking the same thing. If you ever start to doubt who's on the right side of this and who... isn't, meditate on the phrase "illegal library". For me, it's right up there with "illegal hospital".
- ryanmcbride 3y ago"Won't someone PLEASE think of the money?"
- fractallyte 3y agoThe sense of entitlement in some of this discussion is quite alarming. If I'm a writer of fiction, you are not automatically entitled to my novel, into which I expended an enormous amount of effort and time. You're expected to pay a fair price for it. If you demand "free" entertainment, write it yourself! If I'm a textbook author, "information" does not "want to be free". There's a huge distinction between knowledge and information. Knowledge is "out there"; you're free to collect it by yourself. Information is my interpretation of that knowledge, structured and packaged into a book. Information is not free. You are not entitled to the product of my labor - pay fairly for it, please! Note this this post is not about publishers, but authors: the originators of creative thought and structured information. You do not have a right to that work without a fair exchange.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raincole 3y agoIf LibGen only shares public-funded research papers maybe it deserves the praise (still illegal, obviously). But that's not how LibGen works. Not at all. HN just really hates copyright.
- barrysteve 3y agoThere is a deep irony that most technology is built on achievements by Newton, Babbage, ect, ect. Many scientists and authors who depended on universities, authorship and royalties for their bread and butter. And now that they've sowed the seed of computing, we want to turn around and destroy the very methods and media they used to create it. Isaac Newton alive today, couldn't make a penny for his discovery of calculus through 15yrs of work. All the money and women would go to ChatGPT or Wikipedia or whatever research instituition technically owns his work. It's obvious that there are few new ideas, real revolutions and conceptual improvements happening. It's because we killed off the incentive to work on a problem for a really long time. Piracy destroys, that's all it does. The internet could have been a tool for emancipation, but it became a tool for mass thievery. And people have the gall to defend it, as if Google and Netfix or ChatGPT make up for the death of studying as a universal kind of progress. Put me back to sleep. We wasted our computing revolution relacing the old media with faster, more ambigious versions of the old ones.