111–120 of 215 posts
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imagine if you built a building and then someone purchased it... and everyone that visited it also had to also pay you.... thats a bit like how copyright is today... But what is even worst is that they are trying to make you pay them forever (subscriptions).
Then how do you propose that creatives make a living? Come on, no dawdling!
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My layman's understanding of copyright law says you didn't commit a crime, but whoever sent you the book did commit a crime. My understanding is that it's not illegal to download a book, it's illegal to distribute a book. (Or other copyrighted work.)
No, it is illegal to download (make a copy of) the book. To be legal, you would have to merely view the book without making a copy. This is the operating principle behind all those video streaming sites. This isn't a comment on what OP should have done.
eg in some countries participation in some parts of it (uploading/downloading/etc) is legal, whereas in other countries it can be the other way around.
Something that has always bothered me about z-lib and libgen and so on is the impossibility of being able to tell quality from the different uploads. Sometimes the epubs are very good, with a good cover and metadata as well as chapters and no weird aberrations; other times, they're unreadable. But the only thing you have to judge quality is size and general description of the upload which in this website it's been re…
Large pdf and djvu files generally means low quality scans.
A straight-text book can run as little as 500--750 KiB for 100--200 pages or so.
ePubs may run smaller as they're a compressed archive of HTML files, so how large the straight text is is largely a matter of the additional markup and stylesheets applied. I've generated PDFs from Markdown which are fairly comparable.
Most mainstream trade press books run about 3--6 MiB as PDFs, if they have few images or graphics.
Books with a heavy graphics content can easily swell to 30--300 MiB.
And scanned rather than generated PDFs tend to run similarly sized. Many of those scans are, however, excellent quality.
The largest ebook within my own collection for quite some time was a copy of Lyell's Geography, downloaded from the Internet Archive and based on a library scan of a 19th-century printing. On a colour tablet, it's actually pretty nice reading, on a B&W E-ink tablet, such scans often have a significant background ghosting which may or may not be eliminated by contrast adjustments in your reader.
For newer materials, I've seen any number of issues with ebooks:
- Clean single-page scans with OCR'd text for highlighting and copy/paste are generally my favourite. There's something about original print layouts that I still find preferable to ePubs and other digital-native formats.
- Native PDF can also be quite good though they're far more prone to designeritis, where someone has thought they could improve over ink-on-paper conventions. If you think you can do this, you are almost certainly wrong.
- ePubs rerendered as PDFs are among the worst options. I prefer PDFs generally, but not in this case.
- ePubs ... can ... be reasonably good, though again the principle problem is excessive flexibility for designers. Less is more. I really miss having a single consistent layout of the text, rather than something which reflows as font faces, sizes, and spacing are changed. As a saving grace, cringeworthy (and migrane-inducing) font choices can be overridden with The One True Serif Font.
- Various low-quality scans. 2-up, lots of page skew and placement variation, heavily-marked texts, and such. I'll still almost always prefer these to an ePub or other digital-native format, though the reading can be much harder.
- Tiny-font 3-column scientific publications. Even on my 13" e-ink reader, these can be a challenge, and I'll occasionally resort to a sub-page rendering (this is natively supported in the Onyx NeoReader and several other e-book readers). Why such publications continue to insist on this format as we approach the 2nd quarter of the 21st century I've no idea at all. Scans based on older journal pubs (from ~1950s -- 1980s or so) with both physical wear and scan artefacts can be especially challenging.
Is it dangerous to host sites like this? I love making tools like this but worry about the repercussions
Seeing that the US managed to extradite a British citizen from his own country for hosting links, I would definitely say so. The right way is to do this is to host this on tor or similar and only advertise it on the internet behind a good vpn. It's ridiculous that this is what people need to do to help others, but that's what ridiculous laws and circus courts get you.
I hope every project you work on has it's source code stolen resulting in failure. And this is coming from a pretty crappy person, but this website sure does love stealing from authors (so that it can enjoy the fruits of their labor).
The publishing industry prefers, however, to hoard its Smaug-gold, make criminals of the curious, deny access both to the vast majority of the population and to the vast majority of works, all to line its own pockets at an immense cost to the rest of us, authors, artists, musicians, and other creators included.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018>
Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge is a public good"
https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/30...>
Copyright is brain damage:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc>
Is it dangerous to host sites like this? I love making tools like this but worry about the repercussions
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is illegal to download (make a copy of) the book. To be legal, you would have to merely view the book without making a copy. This is the operating principle behind all those video streaming sites. This isn't a comment on what OP should have done.
Doesn't this vary according to the location of the participants? eg in some countries participation in some parts of it (uploading/downloading/etc) is legal, whereas in other countries it can be the other way around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is illegal to download (make a copy of) the book. To be legal, you would have to merely view the book without making a copy. This is the operating principle behind all those video streaming sites. This isn't a comment on what OP should have done.
Wouldn't the transmission over the network of the bits of the video count as an act of copying?
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That is a crude rendition of the AI art debate, and also of piracy. A public library buys the book. Many people can read it, but it guarantees one purchase, and often many libraries will buy the book. It also limits the amount of readers to those who live relatively nearby. Books were also traditionally written with the ideas of libraries in the author's mind, and also many authors benefited themselves from libraries…
By that logic, then controlled digital lending -- where a public digital library buy one digital book and "lend" it by artificially limiting the amount of concurrent reader -- should be legal then, since it simulates the limitation of physical library in the digital realm.
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> my own solution that did everything I wanted Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter! (I really would appreciate any pointers to additional info on something that actually works...)
I’m building a connectivity lib in Golang for relay-assisted p2p over tcp. The implementation is simple, uses only a single network connection when idle, and establishes connections very quickly and reliably. Downside is it’s not decentralized and it’s also not UDP, in case that’s your thing. Oh and BYO auth. Please reach out if it fits your use case.