Z-Library to let users share physical books

Not everything though. There are some books I've only ever found through antiquarian shops and private libraries (eg http://londonlibrary.co.uk/ ) which are of historical and cultural value but which will probably never be digitised. Unless I do it, anyway.

There's also a whole world of professional texts in law and other subjects which I've had to access by taking the £200 train down to London to physically sit in the British Library and read (and often, photograph). The more interesting the thing you're doing, the more likely it is that you'll need to venture to an actual library, often one of considerable age.

That's not even to mention the historical archives etc, indexes of which are held centrally but the materials are scattered all over.

Some thoughts...

On the connected question of why human societies accelerated their development over time (recently posted on HN) a couple of comments are pertinent (see [0] and [1]).

If one values the continued acceleration of human development (in all its expanding pluralities) then there is a strong case for something like Z-lib to exist for a lot of factual or science-generated information being available for everyone. For such texts, I would guess that what the library contains could lag behind the commercial publication front by 5-10 years without appreciable profit loss to the publishing companies, nor significant losses to the estates of individuals who created them. And taking away some of their back catalogue might actually reduce publishers' running costs... (Ask: Can anyone else on HN put hard numbers to this?)

The debate seems similar to the one regarding taxation vs. inflation rate rises. Governments are currently choosing to raise inflation rates because that doesn't impede trade flows as much as some potential friction coming from moving money through a government bureaucracy for some cause. The particular cause matters, but the choice is about efficiency in essence. The same with Z-lib, as I see it. A Z-lib type free digital library could raise global efficiency in all sorts of areas, but the argument will only pass if various forms of extortive-because-looking-very-obsolete-now old capitalist inefficiences can be demonstrated to be such. Lots of publishing companies are probably holding on to old titles that for them are already digital landfill in their archives. Maybe they just need to see that clearly.

The other catch is that the "for everyone" phrase implies a representative global stakeholder is needed for it to "get legal". UN.org/z-lib anyone?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35493797 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35495511

You should be able to create an account on that domain here (unless something has changed since I last registered) https://singlelogin.me/registration.php

You get your own personal domain/subdomain of zlibrary after logging in

vFlat Scan [0] automates the unwarping.

[0] https://www.vflat.com/

Hate is the wrong word. Publishers and libraries have a complicated, sometimes antagonistic relationship. It's also important to understand that 'publishers' are not homogenous. Outside of the big 4/5, many publishers love and go out of their way to support libraries.

The issue is that the relationship is asymmetric. Even though publishers make good money from libraries, libraries need publishers more than publishers need them right now. IMO, libraries need to continue to move beyond being only thought of as places to read the latest NYT best seller list for free.