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Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge (2018) [pdf]
- Xerox9213 3y agoInteresting. The authors focused a lot on competing with market vs archival purposes. For me, and I reckon a lot of other people, I used libgen because I just want a PDF or epub that is not muddied with DRM or behind a university wall. Most of the books I download I already have a paper copy of, but want to be able to use it digitally. For me it’s all about convenience. I guess that would be pretty hard to measure.
- unixhero 3y agoI used it to not have to pay. I buy 10 books per year off Amazon and the occasional Economist magazine. I am of course not paying for academic journal access or tons of academic books outside my field.
- dacryn 3y agoI use it to wade through the masses. Download 10 ebooks on a subject, scroll through, read a few excerpts, and the one that I actually start reading, I buy from amazon or a local bookstore and actually read it. Many books look great, but once you start reading them, are total garbage. This is in the field of IT literature though, so books tend to be very hit or miss, and quickly outdated.
- nicolas_t 3y agoI've done that a lot especially with books on raising a child, education etc... Most books are bad, I don't want to pay until I know the book is good.
- kqr 3y agoThis is close to my use case as well. I mainly buy e-books these days, but they are often published as an afterthought[1] and not designed for readers – things like maths and plots get mangled in the process and vary from excellent to completely unreadable. So I want something closer to the physical book to look up the equations and visuals, but I don't want to have to go to the library[2] for each one. A PDF scan of the print book is very convenient. [1] Sometimes they are literally an OCR of the print book! You can tell because of the symbol substitutions. [2] Even most digital libraries I've tried are very inconvenient to "go to". Archive.org might be the exception.
- posterboy 3y ago> Sometimes they are literally an OCR of the print book! You can tell because of the symbol substitutions. Not really. TEX for example does a lot of weird character substitution behind the scenes to mangle the layout.
- InitialLastName 3y agohow often does TEX substitute "rn" for "m" though?
- kqr 3y agoComma instead of subscript i is one of my pet peeves.
- fyokdrigd 3y agoit's actually very easy to measure. the audience here is close to the 1%, so your usecase is already discarded in the grand scheme with a 2% error margin when measuring behavior for the large population.
- crest 3y agoBut it is a good place to get an insight into what could motivate enough technically minded (and connected) people to sustain such risky projects.
- vmfunction 3y agoYup hnews is not a good place to do market research for general population.
- LesZedCB 3y agomy friend in college bought texts books before the first semester when their parents took them to the book store. then a classmate showed them libgen and didn't buy any more text books except the one weird custom textbook by some professor. i guess they buy all their books now that they have a job, but also with generous use of used book stores and physical libraries. oh and dont buy though amazon, especially kindle.
- aegypti 3y agoThis pretty much mirrors my experience exactly, but these days I lean a lot more heavily on the Libby app for borrowing from my library which is amazing. What’s the issue with Amazon/Kindle though, the fakes?
- LesZedCB 3y agotheir de-facto monopoly status on basically all things books and increasingly on publishing, and of course their absolutely inane DRM. libby is amazing, people are completely sleeping on it if you're not using it. free e-books!
- wolverine876 3y agoTalking to some students, I'm told that people often freely pass a book on to the next semester's students.
- eclecticfrank 3y agoLibgen fills an important gap in the paid archives/libraries. There are always some books, papers or articles that are not available through my university library. It's a huge help to have documents available immediately and not having to pay a small fortune for a single document that might prove irrelevant.
- uniqueuid 3y agoGreat to see this here. The author Balázs Bodó is an all around great guy with very refreshing research methods and an immensely broad portfolio of things he works on [1]. [1] https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html#Publications https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html#Publica...
- crvdgc 3y agoInteresting research. However, in practical terms, I wouldn't count Kindle as a form of digital availability, unless the book is composed of pure text. Browsing figures or tables is usually a very bad experience. The figures are usually in low resolution. And the tables are sometime just pictures. Even if the publisher bothered to encode the table as a table, if it spans over one screen size, navigation becomes very hard. Not to mention symbols and formulas.
- hodanli 3y agoThis is an incredibly valuable resource for those outside of the US and EU, where the prices for books in English (imported) are extremely high.
- JacobSeated 3y agoNot to devalue the tireless work of authors, but we must also recognize that students in particular do not have enough money to pay for all these books. At the same time, it can be argued that writing a single book, and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms of ways to make money. The hard part is to get people to actually buy your book – it does not matter that you wrote the best book in the world if nobody gives you well deserved attention for it. Bloggers suffer from the same problem, and it is not necessarily because their work is bad. The truth of the matter just is, nobody cares about quality information anymore (And I am guilty of this as well). We want fast and summarized answers so we can move on to the important part: solving whatever concrete problem we are working on. AI will probably delude the little remaining value of information even further, and at a point, nobody will manually write comprehensive information anymore. At least not unassisted by AI, and while the quality may suffer, we must also realize that we do not really need 100% accurate information. If we get a statistically significant amout of accurate AI provided information, then there is no need for anyone to write books anymore. It will be a complete unappreciated waste of their time, and nobody is going to buy them. Even now that I am in a decent job, I still prefer not to buy books, instead relying on free sources on the internet (not piracy). If a given book/information is not available for free, then it is often not important enough for me to bother (note often – not always). It is also a matter of prioritizing – reading a book takes me way too long, and the process is far-from comfortable due to my slow reading, and for that reason alone I tend to avoid reading entire books. It strikes me as an antiquated way to gain information even without AI. I may open a specific chapter of interest, but reading the entire thing is painfully tedious, and probably unnecessary.
- squigz 3y agoWhy do people buy books now, instead of just reading reviews?
- eclecticfrank 3y agoObvious troll, but anyway: Reviews are there to help identify if books are worth reading/buying. Reviews cannot and are not supposed to replace books.
- Cenk 3y agoIf you are interested in Library Genesis (and shadow libraries in general) I can recommend this book by Joe Karaganis: https://boook.link/Shadow-Libraries https://boook.link/Shadow-Libraries
- abridges6523 3y agoBut which shadow library can I find this book on?
- Funes- 3y agoJust click on "PDF".
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoPDFs suck on e-readers. But you can get an epub on at least one of the shadow libraries :)
- bigbacaloa 3y agoIn Spain my home internet provider (Movistar) blocks access to LibGen and the like. My university, however, does not. It realizes that de facto these sources serve as the library for its professors. So I wind up having to connect through the university VPN anyway ...
- wyan 3y agoThey usually block via DNS, so it's pretty easy to circumvent by using alternative DNS servers such as 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9, or Tor (which you sometimes need for books that have been DMCA'd)
- dzonga 3y agolibrary genesis is a god-send. there's plenty of out of print books or that you won't find at specialized retailers but would find on lib-gen.
- tschwimmer 3y agoI predict that Libgen/SciHub and pirate sites in generall will be rendered functionally inaccessible in the developed west in the coming years. My reasoning is as follows: Historically, IP owners have tried various strategies to increase revenues by curtailing infringement. In the early 2000s, IP owners tried to extract revenue directly from pirates via honeypot torrents and ISP subpoenas. Since about 2010, IP owners have shifted towards a more passive approach where they prioritize infringement for commercial purposes only and largely leave piracy for personal consumption alone. It just didn't make sense to chase after teenagers and students who probably wouldn't have had the money to make a legit purchase anyway. LLMs trained on huge corpuses that include pirated content like LibGen change everything. Now, these IP holders face an existential (or at least severe) threat to their business models in the form of AI generated content. At the very least, these IP holders missed out on a massive opportunity to extract some the wealth created by AIs by virtue of their laxity in going after easily available pirate content. I'd expect to see a strong swing back towards very draconian enforcement of against even personal infringement: domestic ISP DNS blocking, perhaps even mandatory browser or operating system level blocking of infringement.
- techomsystemau 3y ago[flagged]