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Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

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Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#151

Post by mahdi7d1 »

pipes wrote: post #86
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #19

I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits. If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive. Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose book…

Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed. Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This…

I live in Iran and the administrative hurdles the op was mentioned are not an issue here because you just can't even buy intwrnationally to begin with so there is no hurdle you might need to circumvent. The few English books I have are largely illegal reprints of a pirated version or some old ancient printed version that have somehow gotten imported (no clue how or is there an actual legal way)

I remember opening "thinking fast and slow" and noticing the weird paging. After checking the official version's page count and seeing how the version in my hand doesn't match, my best guess was that someone had printed a pirated epub version.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#152

Post by mahdi7d1 »

mahdi7d1 wrote: post #151
pipes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work. I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed. Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This…

I live in Iran and the administrative hurdles the op was mentioned are not an issue here because you just can't even buy intwrnationally to begin with so there is no hurdle you might need to circumvent. The few English books I have are largely illegal reprints of a pirated version or some old ancient printed version that have somehow gotten imported (no clue how or is there an actual legal way) I remember opening "th…

I rambled so much that I forgot to say what I laid all that introduction for.

I'm not part of the market for these products. I don't have access to them nor even if I buy some imported (probably illegally and by single persons) or printed version, am I going to benefit them since I'm disconnected monetarily from yhe author.

Me reading pirated versions of these books has no negative effects on the earnings of the authors.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#153

Post by sublimefire »

cubefox wrote: post #134

HN logic: Training on copyrighted material --> bad Actually distributing copyrighted material --> good Needless to say, this is backwards. Any copyright holder will be much more worried about the latter.

The problem is that it is quite difficult to access the published papers is you are not in academia or some company that pays for the access, so AA sort of serves that niche to transfer the knowledge. Training on the other hand is a commercial activity to later rent the model, if this would be purely for open weights I suspect everyone was cool with it.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#155

Post by Dusseldorf »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #19

I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits. If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive. Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose book…

I'm glad your username specifies your location. My biggest pet peeve online these days is someone telling a story about "my country" but never specifying which country that is.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#156

Post by paxcoder »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #35

https://SourceLibrary.org has about 16,000 rare books translated — most for the first time. 50,000 books archived (will be translated when we have $$ for it). More tokens than English Wikipedia and about .75 petabytes. Not sure if we will qualify for a bounty, but happy to share! Btw, we are looking for funding from small or large donors who want to help us translate the Renaissance…

TL;DR: AI translated books on the occult and occult-adjecent themes :/

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#157

Post by Cider9986 »

jvm___ wrote: post #41
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #19

I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits. If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive. Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose book…

https://send.djazz.se/ This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.

On my Kindle I use KOReader Zlibrary plugin which allows you to download books from within the reader. It's more convenient then any send-to-kindle workflow.

https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#158

Post by gpm »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #75
dlenski wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are not too many mentally-sharp, fully-employed, terminally-ill people that I have met. Even fewer at tech companies. And even fewer who are single and childless. (Google would likely go after the estate of anyone who did this.)

I wonder how hard they would press an estate. It’s bad PR to go after widows and surviving children, and the data has already escaped. This is something they’d want to settle quietly, so the family would have leverage.

I wonder how hard Google could press an estate. For a living person the main consequences would be criminal, not civil, but you can't go after a dead person criminally. Civilly it's not really clear to me that Google would have been harmed enough to create noteworthy damages.

The book publishers might actually be the bigger problem. They'd have civil copyright infringement claims with giant statutory damages.

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#159

Post by zerobees »

whycome wrote: post #147
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #19

I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits. If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive. Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose book…

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum.

This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

Re: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

#160

Post by xp84 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #120
brookst wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine if we didn’t have libraries and someone tried to create them today? From publishers to right wingers, they would be painted as communist plots to destroy creativity.

The Internet Archive tried, at great cost and peril, to defend its ability to lend books as an online library due to format shift (physical books get first sale doctrine, ebooks are licensed, you cannot own them), and were told no by the system, so “pirating” it is until copyright changes and becomes more reasonable. Disk is cheap, and the Internet global. Global distributed storage system durability and availability…

As a wise man once said, if “buying” isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. Words to live by, arrrrrrrr.
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