12 ms·

Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

419 points by hn_acker 2y ago

micheal0147 2y ago
[dead]
elashri 2y ago
> Z-Library, or a similar website, is helpful to students living in poverty (82% agree). I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons? I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.
- rany_ 2y ago
  > Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons? That really can't be it because the question isn't about whether it is moral, legal or good for publishers. I really think this is just elitism and gatekeeping at its worst.
  - shlomo_z 2y ago
    That's why this _can_ be it. If authors stop writing books it will hurt students (who wont have books to read). Nothing to do with ethics or morals.
- foundry27 2y ago
  I’d guess the easiest explanation (which admittedly erases all nuance) is that folks just misinterpreted the question and reflexively dismissed it as soon as they saw “Z-Library” and “Helpful”. I’d also be inclined to discard theoretical “in the long run it’ll be unhelpful” concerns, since that opens up an infinitely-deep can of hypothetical contrived scenarios of arbitrary complexity that can’t be disproven. I’m sure there are very real concerns, but it’s impossible to reason about which concerns specifically people would care about. IMO that leaves the purely practical concerns: - Students in poverty might not have reliable internet, devices or digital literacy. If zlib isn’t available to them, it isn’t helpful - Books available might not cater to the local language/culture, or the real world curriculum needs of those students. If zlib doesn’t help them succeed, it isn’t helpful - The interface sucks and is confusing, which makes students struggle to find what‘s useful. If zlib isn’t useable for them, it isn’t helpful
- theendisney 2y ago
  "Educated slaves are unhappy"
  - cynicalsecurity 2y ago
    Educated slaves also refuse to work for peanuts.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  I would assume that a good chunk of students in poverty simply don't have a device that works well for consuming books on. If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.) I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.) And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)
  - thfuran 2y ago
    >And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.) It's a disgrace that universities are willing to use books that have been turned into consumable goods by single-use software or usurious saas rental messes.
    - Xxfireman 2y ago
      Yes, this is how textbook manufactures sell to university. One time codes for online exercises / labs. This happens mostly for intro classes. I have no idea why universities do this, my guess is they are sold on hw problems being randomized so it makes cheating more difficult.
      - eesmith 2y ago
        What I don't get is that 20 or so years ago there were professors writing online books meant as no-cost alternatives to the corporate publishing companies which controlled much of the academic market. Why did all of those projects fail?
  - jfvinueza 2y ago
    If you don't have a laptop, the place you live in / study at probably doesn't have a good public library.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  [flagged]
- vundercind 2y ago
  What’s the lizardman constant? 4% or so? There’s some of it.
- melagonster 2y ago
  Maybe they do not need more textbooks? If they do not need to follow newest version of it, they can get second hand book.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    Maybe I was a bad student, but I stopped buying books after my freshman year, unless there was a very specific reason to have it. I really didn’t use most of them. I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      It depends on your major. For those who study English, for instance, many of the assigned books are out of copywrite already. And new books are market price so they won't be more than 20 dollars. And if you're in a not so conservative English department a lot of the "theory" texts, aside from the more obscure ones, are freely available online because they're written by people who care more about intellectual freedom than making a buck or two.
- bluedays 2y ago
  I could play devils advocate and say that it’s bad for poor students because if authors are not fairly compensated then these authors won’t write textbooks and if they don’t then future students won’t benefit from having the textbooks.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Few academic authors are in it for the money.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      I mean yeah, getting your work published just means that you can sue if someone steals it (often the case with those university presidents that they plagiarized work from undergrads or those who otherwise couldn't fight back). But if publishers stop making money off academic texts, then they won't be inclined to fight those battles. Then again, a lot of the money comes from university library subscriptions to entire catalogues of texts including books and articles, so either something you want to access is already in your ecosystem or it isn't.
  - 8note 2y ago
    When my courses had profs who had written the book, they'd have the school book store print and bind them to booklets, and sell them for close enough to cost, and also put up a download link for the pdf
- crvdgc 2y ago
  An interpretation given the benefit of the doubt is, using Z-library might get the said student in trouble and therefore is not helpful overall.
bastard_op 2y ago
Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy. Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.
- jjtheblunt 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
    If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing. Enough with the false equivalence.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      If. I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it. Enough with the false dichotomy.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.
  - underlipton 2y ago
    Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery. IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.
OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking. I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.
- anonym29 2y ago
  The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available. Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with. An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Should Apple be the only ones allowed to make money? You can't pirate Apple News, iCloud Storage, all sorts of services and conventional media they provide. You can't pirate App Store IAP. You don't have to make a single value judgement to see that the status quo - the only permissible action to take against piracy is to make unassailable DRM - is really just conceding that the fully vertically integrated platforms ought to own anything. Surely it's not good that only Apple is allowed to make money.
    - BrenBarn 2y ago
photochemsyn 2y ago
Academic textbooks are mostly a racket, forced upon a captive market (the student body) and - with rare but notable exceptions - not books that most students would care to hold onto after graduation. Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts. Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets. If you used an LLM, you'd have to proof every single problem to make sure there weren't issues with it that would lead to student's having unintended difficulties with them. Yes it "saves time," until a problem is assigned whose "right answer" takes not only far longer than all the others but is ridiculously complex and impossible to grade or complete in any reasonable amount of time. Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself, and it also keeps answers from circulating amongst students, and saves time for the professor who won't have to do the above every single week, they can just pick however many problems they like out of the book for the relevant section.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    > Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets. Who gives a damn about publishers? They introduce artificial distribution costs; They are not capable of or refuse to fact-check; the copy-editing they provide is well within the capabilities of ai; at best they introduce asset-providers (eg illustrators) to writers. > Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself Who cares? The western academic system is already laughably bad at weeding out the incapable. Just let people cheat. It's not like people aren't cheating already.
theendisney 2y ago
I dont have to like it but if we are doing competitive capitalism we should upgrade the citizens as much as possible. In stead of publicly funded limitations we should spend the money on the opposite. If we want to win the game that is.
mgraybosch 2y ago
I don't blame them. If buying isn't owning, then downloading isn't stealing.
joshdavham 2y ago
I'll still never forget the day I learned about the existence of Z-library. I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library. I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"
humanlity 2y ago
Never forget Aaron Swartz
- freefaler 2y ago
  He was a great person & a real hero! His series "Raw Nerve" is very good: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
anonym29 2y ago
Especially in the age of DRM (enshittification of ownership), where many games that lose functionality when the developer shuts down servers, where ebooks routinely get redacted, rewritten, or censored, where the availability of movies you "bought" shifts year by year as licensing changes occur, it is evident that "buying" no longer means "owning", and if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
mkolodny 2y ago
On VirusTotal, 5 different vendors flag Z-Library as malicious. Are they just flagging the site because of IP issues, or is the site full of malware?
- ajvs 2y ago
  If you're going to the official domains linked from their Wikipedia article then there's definitely no malware.
  - mkolodny 2y ago
    One vendor on VirusTotal flagged the domain currently linked from their Wikipedia article as malicious.
medo-bear 2y ago
libgen is the modern library of alexandria. and it is free as in beer. thank you russians
petterroea 2y ago
> The findings, however, suggest that students are more likely to draw comparisons with “Robin Hood”. This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles. In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.
wortelefant 2y ago
Annas Archive is even more popular these days, these shadow libraries often present a better user experience than many online bookstores as well.
sureglymop 2y ago
I will say that in my college classes, the first thing I always do is to download the PDFs of the recommended books to accompany the classes. Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty). Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages. I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.
- throwaway983561 2y ago
  That's exactly my use case. Every single time I read (not totally as reading from a regular screen is not for me) a book from a PDF and I like it I definitely purchase a physical copy. I do the same if I hear an album that I like. Imagine like spending 150U$S on a book and it turns out that the approach is not for you. Every book is different and so are readers. What might be a good read for me might not necessary apply to other readers. Z-Lib and Libgenesis are a bliss and hope they are never taken down.
- freefaler 2y ago
  There also good resources like: annas-archive, libgen, and the good old sci-hub. For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient. Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier. Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.
nathancahill 2y ago
We need the equivalent of Z-Library or Sci-Hub for standards documents. It's a shakedown to pay $300 for a PDF of a public standard.
- Balgair 2y ago
  A tip for anyone trying to access such documents: Email the authors, if you can find them. 99/100 times, they will just send it to you for free. Now, finding the authors isn't easy for standards docs, but it can be done
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
I'm surprised they were on the regular internet and not on Tor. Like, what else did they expect.
dzonga 2y ago
knowledge should be free - for the benefit of mankind.
- freefaler 2y ago
  if it takes a person to create a knowledge and the person need food/shelter/computer to produce the knowledge and can't sell it, how will he survive by giving the knowledge for free?
  - dzonga 2y ago
    say an academic publishes a paper - put the paper out for free. get paid for speaking engagements / guest lecturers and consultation with industry.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jomoho 2y ago
I think it's just replacing what a a good Library or Bookstore would have given you in previous times: cross reading many different books, without having to commit and pay upfront. The assumption that I'm going to pay for a book upfront without being able to leaf through it from front to back is preposterous.
richrichie 2y ago
> “Living in a 3rd world country, 1 book would cost like 50%- 80% already of my daily wage,” one Redditor wrote. Typical technical books are priced at upwards of $50. $100 a day is not poor by any means in 3rd world countries.
- tecleandor 2y ago
  It's probably monthly. Lots of medical, engineering or physics books cost upwards of $100 or even $200
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tap-snap-or-nap 2y ago
Aaron Swartz was right
thevillagechief 2y ago
If you grew up in a 3rd world country, you know you could never afford access to any of the academic/training resources needed to get out of the cycle of poverty. So you did what you had to do. Now I'm addicted to buying books, some of which I'll never read past 2 chapters, probably because of the trauma.
beej71 2y ago
Here's a weird story. I found a PDF of an algorithms book I liked on Anna's. Not a scan, but an original PDF. It's a good book, so I decided I should buy it. But I don't keep a physical shelf anymore. The thing is, the publisher doesn't sell the PDF! Which makes me wonder where the pirated PDF came from. Insider leak?

419 points by hn_acker 2y ago

[dead]

> Z-Library, or a similar website, is helpful to students living in poverty (82% agree). I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons? I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.

rany_ 2y ago
> Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons? That really can't be it because the question isn't about whether it is moral, legal or good for publishers. I really think this is just elitism and gatekeeping at its worst.
- shlomo_z 2y ago
  That's why this _can_ be it. If authors stop writing books it will hurt students (who wont have books to read). Nothing to do with ethics or morals.
foundry27 2y ago
I’d guess the easiest explanation (which admittedly erases all nuance) is that folks just misinterpreted the question and reflexively dismissed it as soon as they saw “Z-Library” and “Helpful”. I’d also be inclined to discard theoretical “in the long run it’ll be unhelpful” concerns, since that opens up an infinitely-deep can of hypothetical contrived scenarios of arbitrary complexity that can’t be disproven. I’m sure there are very real concerns, but it’s impossible to reason about which concerns specifically people would care about. IMO that leaves the purely practical concerns: - Students in poverty might not have reliable internet, devices or digital literacy. If zlib isn’t available to them, it isn’t helpful - Books available might not cater to the local language/culture, or the real world curriculum needs of those students. If zlib doesn’t help them succeed, it isn’t helpful - The interface sucks and is confusing, which makes students struggle to find what‘s useful. If zlib isn’t useable for them, it isn’t helpful
theendisney 2y ago
"Educated slaves are unhappy"
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  Educated slaves also refuse to work for peanuts.
crazygringo 2y ago
I would assume that a good chunk of students in poverty simply don't have a device that works well for consuming books on. If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.) I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.) And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)
- thfuran 2y ago
  >And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.) It's a disgrace that universities are willing to use books that have been turned into consumable goods by single-use software or usurious saas rental messes.
  - Xxfireman 2y ago
    Yes, this is how textbook manufactures sell to university. One time codes for online exercises / labs. This happens mostly for intro classes. I have no idea why universities do this, my guess is they are sold on hw problems being randomized so it makes cheating more difficult.
    - eesmith 2y ago
      What I don't get is that 20 or so years ago there were professors writing online books meant as no-cost alternatives to the corporate publishing companies which controlled much of the academic market. Why did all of those projects fail?
- jfvinueza 2y ago
  If you don't have a laptop, the place you live in / study at probably doesn't have a good public library.
wkat4242 2y ago
[flagged]
vundercind 2y ago
What’s the lizardman constant? 4% or so? There’s some of it.
melagonster 2y ago
Maybe they do not need more textbooks? If they do not need to follow newest version of it, they can get second hand book.
- al_borland 2y ago
  Maybe I was a bad student, but I stopped buying books after my freshman year, unless there was a very specific reason to have it. I really didn’t use most of them. I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    It depends on your major. For those who study English, for instance, many of the assigned books are out of copywrite already. And new books are market price so they won't be more than 20 dollars. And if you're in a not so conservative English department a lot of the "theory" texts, aside from the more obscure ones, are freely available online because they're written by people who care more about intellectual freedom than making a buck or two.
bluedays 2y ago
I could play devils advocate and say that it’s bad for poor students because if authors are not fairly compensated then these authors won’t write textbooks and if they don’t then future students won’t benefit from having the textbooks.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Few academic authors are in it for the money.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    I mean yeah, getting your work published just means that you can sue if someone steals it (often the case with those university presidents that they plagiarized work from undergrads or those who otherwise couldn't fight back). But if publishers stop making money off academic texts, then they won't be inclined to fight those battles. Then again, a lot of the money comes from university library subscriptions to entire catalogues of texts including books and articles, so either something you want to access is already in your ecosystem or it isn't.
- 8note 2y ago
  When my courses had profs who had written the book, they'd have the school book store print and bind them to booklets, and sell them for close enough to cost, and also put up a download link for the pdf
crvdgc 2y ago
An interpretation given the benefit of the doubt is, using Z-library might get the said student in trouble and therefore is not helpful overall.

bastard_op 2y ago

Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy. Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.

jjtheblunt 2y ago
[flagged]
- LennyHenrysNuts 2y ago
  If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing. Enough with the false equivalence.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    If. I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it. Enough with the false dichotomy.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.
- underlipton 2y ago
  Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery. IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.

OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago

At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking. I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.

anonym29 2y ago
The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available. Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with. An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  Should Apple be the only ones allowed to make money? You can't pirate Apple News, iCloud Storage, all sorts of services and conventional media they provide. You can't pirate App Store IAP. You don't have to make a single value judgement to see that the status quo - the only permissible action to take against piracy is to make unassailable DRM - is really just conceding that the fully vertically integrated platforms ought to own anything. Surely it's not good that only Apple is allowed to make money.
  - BrenBarn 2y ago

photochemsyn 2y ago

Academic textbooks are mostly a racket, forced upon a captive market (the student body) and - with rare but notable exceptions - not books that most students would care to hold onto after graduation. Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts. Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets. If you used an LLM, you'd have to proof every single problem to make sure there weren't issues with it that would lead to student's having unintended difficulties with them. Yes it "saves time," until a problem is assigned whose "right answer" takes not only far longer than all the others but is ridiculously complex and impossible to grade or complete in any reasonable amount of time. Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself, and it also keeps answers from circulating amongst students, and saves time for the professor who won't have to do the above every single week, they can just pick however many problems they like out of the book for the relevant section.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets. Who gives a damn about publishers? They introduce artificial distribution costs; They are not capable of or refuse to fact-check; the copy-editing they provide is well within the capabilities of ai; at best they introduce asset-providers (eg illustrators) to writers. > Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself Who cares? The western academic system is already laughably bad at weeding out the incapable. Just let people cheat. It's not like people aren't cheating already.

theendisney 2y ago

I dont have to like it but if we are doing competitive capitalism we should upgrade the citizens as much as possible. In stead of publicly funded limitations we should spend the money on the opposite. If we want to win the game that is.

mgraybosch 2y ago

I don't blame them. If buying isn't owning, then downloading isn't stealing.

joshdavham 2y ago

I'll still never forget the day I learned about the existence of Z-library. I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library. I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"

humanlity 2y ago

Never forget Aaron Swartz

freefaler 2y ago
He was a great person & a real hero! His series "Raw Nerve" is very good: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

anonym29 2y ago

Especially in the age of DRM (enshittification of ownership), where many games that lose functionality when the developer shuts down servers, where ebooks routinely get redacted, rewritten, or censored, where the availability of movies you "bought" shifts year by year as licensing changes occur, it is evident that "buying" no longer means "owning", and if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

mkolodny 2y ago

On VirusTotal, 5 different vendors flag Z-Library as malicious. Are they just flagging the site because of IP issues, or is the site full of malware?

ajvs 2y ago
If you're going to the official domains linked from their Wikipedia article then there's definitely no malware.
- mkolodny 2y ago
  One vendor on VirusTotal flagged the domain currently linked from their Wikipedia article as malicious.

medo-bear 2y ago

libgen is the modern library of alexandria. and it is free as in beer. thank you russians

petterroea 2y ago

> The findings, however, suggest that students are more likely to draw comparisons with “Robin Hood”. This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles. In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.

wortelefant 2y ago

Annas Archive is even more popular these days, these shadow libraries often present a better user experience than many online bookstores as well.

sureglymop 2y ago

I will say that in my college classes, the first thing I always do is to download the PDFs of the recommended books to accompany the classes. Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty). Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages. I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.

throwaway983561 2y ago
That's exactly my use case. Every single time I read (not totally as reading from a regular screen is not for me) a book from a PDF and I like it I definitely purchase a physical copy. I do the same if I hear an album that I like. Imagine like spending 150U$S on a book and it turns out that the approach is not for you. Every book is different and so are readers. What might be a good read for me might not necessary apply to other readers. Z-Lib and Libgenesis are a bliss and hope they are never taken down.
freefaler 2y ago
There also good resources like: annas-archive, libgen, and the good old sci-hub. For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient. Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs: https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier. Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.

nathancahill 2y ago

We need the equivalent of Z-Library or Sci-Hub for standards documents. It's a shakedown to pay $300 for a PDF of a public standard.

Balgair 2y ago
A tip for anyone trying to access such documents: Email the authors, if you can find them. 99/100 times, they will just send it to you for free. Now, finding the authors isn't easy for standards docs, but it can be done

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

I'm surprised they were on the regular internet and not on Tor. Like, what else did they expect.

dzonga 2y ago

knowledge should be free - for the benefit of mankind.

freefaler 2y ago
if it takes a person to create a knowledge and the person need food/shelter/computer to produce the knowledge and can't sell it, how will he survive by giving the knowledge for free?
- dzonga 2y ago
  say an academic publishes a paper - put the paper out for free. get paid for speaking engagements / guest lecturers and consultation with industry.

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jomoho 2y ago

I think it's just replacing what a a good Library or Bookstore would have given you in previous times: cross reading many different books, without having to commit and pay upfront. The assumption that I'm going to pay for a book upfront without being able to leaf through it from front to back is preposterous.

richrichie 2y ago

> “Living in a 3rd world country, 1 book would cost like 50%- 80% already of my daily wage,” one Redditor wrote. Typical technical books are priced at upwards of $50. $100 a day is not poor by any means in 3rd world countries.

tecleandor 2y ago
It's probably monthly. Lots of medical, engineering or physics books cost upwards of $100 or even $200

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tap-snap-or-nap 2y ago

Aaron Swartz was right

thevillagechief 2y ago

If you grew up in a 3rd world country, you know you could never afford access to any of the academic/training resources needed to get out of the cycle of poverty. So you did what you had to do. Now I'm addicted to buying books, some of which I'll never read past 2 chapters, probably because of the trauma.

beej71 2y ago

Here's a weird story. I found a PDF of an algorithms book I liked on Anna's. Not a scan, but an original PDF. It's a good book, so I decided I should buy it. But I don't keep a physical shelf anymore. The thing is, the publisher doesn't sell the PDF! Which makes me wonder where the pirated PDF came from. Insider leak?