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ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

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Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#141

Post by hutzlibu »

midoridensha wrote: post #134
elil17 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical degradation of the books seems like such a minor effect. I'm pretty gentle with books. As for library ebooks, I had no idea the contracts were structured like that.

Like with so many physical possessions, it really varies from person to person. Some people have libraries full of books they've read, and all their books are in pristine condition. Look at their other possessions and they're all in excellent condition. Other people, you loan them one paperback book, and when you get it back it looks like it's been dropped off a highway overpass bridge and run over in rush-hour traff…

"Some people are just destructive for some reason, and it's entirely from carelessness, not malice. "

And then some people simply consider books as objects for use, and not sacred reliques to be touched only with glothes.

(unless we are talking about historical books)

I mean, books or rather the information in them is kind of sacred to me. But the physical objects are just paper, that can be printed out again, if it has been in too heavy use. And heavy use includes them to be in a tightly packed backpack, close to saltwater or rain, among other things. If I would treat books as fragile things, I would only read them at home, which means, I would miss out on them a lot, as I like to go outside and travel.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#142

Post by zozbot234 »

sixtyfourbits wrote: post #48

Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923 Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Hopefully this will…

I wonder if there's any worthwhile public domain content in that backup? E.g. stuff published prior to 1925, that's not otherwise findable on the usual services (Gutenberg, IA etc.)

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#143

Post by midoridensha »

hutzlibu wrote: post #141
midoridensha wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like with so many physical possessions, it really varies from person to person. Some people have libraries full of books they've read, and all their books are in pristine condition. Look at their other possessions and they're all in excellent condition. Other people, you loan them one paperback book, and when you get it back it looks like it's been dropped off a highway overpass bridge and run over in rush-hour traff…

"Some people are just destructive for some reason, and it's entirely from carelessness, not malice. " And then some people simply consider books as objects for use, and not sacred reliques to be touched only with glothes. (unless we are talking about historical books) I mean, books or rather the information in them is kind of sacred to me. But the physical objects are just paper, that can be printed out again, if it…

It sounds like you're one of those people who can't handle everyday objects without breaking them somehow.

I'm not talking about treating things as extremely fragile, I'm just referring to being able to use and handle things without somehow destroying them in short order. The people who do this are just like you: they think it's normal and think everyone else is overly cautious, when in reality they're just a clumsy oaf. These are also the kind of people you can't lend tool to, because they'll destroy them, by doing things like using a screwdriver as a pry-bar.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#145

Post by Blackthorn »

komali2 wrote: post #99
Blackthorn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife has a Kindle, we wanted to buy an ebook to support the author but didn't want to go through Amazon anymore because it's Amazon. So we tried buying from Kobo and surprise surprise, they only work with their ereaders because of their shitty DRM! So now Kobo has permanently lost us as a customer too. Great job there folks!

Amazon also does this right? But unlike kindle, kobo devices can easily have libre readers installed on them that can read whatever format you like. I threw koreader on my kobo and haven't looked back. It communicates with my private opds server to download books I have, ah, acquired, and converted to epub. Or sometimes PDF. I think it can even read MOBI though, i vaguely remember accidentally uploading some to my ko…

koreader also works on my Kindle. This used to belong to my wife, and got passed to me, and got rooted by me, and koreader installed on it, thus keeping it out of a landfill or generating more e-waste.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#146

Post by snvzz »

braingenious wrote: post #81
sixtyfourbits wrote: post #48

Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923 Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Hopefully this will…

Well damn, I guess I’ve gotta figure out how to get 30+TB of storage. Does anybody have any suggestions for doing that as cheaply as possible?

IPFS would be a start.

Actually, aren't they already using that?

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#147

Post by fortran77 »

majjgepolja wrote: post #133
fortran77 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's stealing. Someone wants to get paid for the work, and they're entitled to get paid. I think people who know it's stealing, but are willing to download books anyway because of their personal risk/reward calculation (or perhaps they dislike the author and don't mind stealing from him!), have an intact moral compass: They know right from wrong. I wonder about people who try to rationalize the crime of book-steal…

Some technical books are too costly for students, especially in third world countries.

So they steal them. Sometimes you need to do what you need to do in order to survive. I'm just saying you shouldn't try to argue that it's "not stealing" if you decide the reward is greater than the risk, or the net benefit exceeds the transgression.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#148

Post by visarga »

dfxm12 wrote: post #55
jrm4 wrote: post #22

As a lawyer, I can't recommend it, but I absolutely cannot discern any moral difference whatsoever between reading a library book for free and purchasing it later if I like it, and doing the same first thing by downloading the ebook from somewhere "unapproved." It's all very silly.

If a book (even an ebook) is in the library, it's already bought and paid for so the author gets whatever compensation they get as if it is a normal sale. I don't think arguing morals makes sense because of how subjective one's morals are, but, by using libraries, you are supporting the arts, whether you liked the book or not, and this is not a silly distinction.

New ways of using books are coming up - you put 1TB of books on your SSD, index it for search and use a neural net on it. Ask a question or pose a task, the model retrieves passages and then computes the reply.

For this to work what is needed is a blanket license for search and snippet use. Can't buy a whole library for such a sparse use case, ain't gonna read it in the classical sense. This approach can guarantee the generated text will not replicate the source material, just use it for reference, with citations.

- DeepMind RETRO - https://www.deepmind.com/publications/improving-language-mod...

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#149

Post by laichzeit0 »

Sorry but I need to browse through your book before I buy it. I do this for all the books I own. I need to see if I’d like it or not. Also, I hate reading on the computer and Kindle is ok but I like making notes in my books so I want the physical copy. If it wasn’t for library genesis or Z-lib I wouldn’t have bought as many books as I have. It’s an indispensable bullshit filter for me. There is no other option for me to browse through books without leaving my house, or even looking at much older books that are only available second hand without these digital catalogues.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#150

Post by OmarAssadi »

braingenious wrote: post #81
sixtyfourbits wrote: post #48

Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923 Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Hopefully this will…

Well damn, I guess I’ve gotta figure out how to get 30+TB of storage. Does anybody have any suggestions for doing that as cheaply as possible?

It'll depend on where you live and what your goals are. If you have free-time to tinker and enjoy that kind of thing, you can build something very fast and reliable and prevent e-waste by building your own storage server with used parts on the cheap.

If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile.

For example, I bought a used Supermicro CSE-836 [1], which is like a 3U server chassis with 16 hot-swappable drive bays and a backplane of some sort.

The backplanes vary, but mine came with the BPN-SAS2-836EL1. I paid $300 in total for the chassis itself, backplane, dual power supplies, heatsinks, etc, along with a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ [2] and two Xeon E5 2660 V2s as a bundle from someone in the 'ServeTheHome' classifieds section [3]. From there, I picked up a load of HGST 3TB 7200rpm SAS2 drives on eBay for about $10 each from a recycling company. And then 192GB of DDR3 ECC memory from the same place for about $80.

I also grabbed a couple less-than-production-ready 3.84TB U.2 NVMe drives on eBay for a little over $100 each.

I think if I were to do it again, I'd have gotten slightly larger, newer drives. These are all totally fine, but I started seeing ~6TB drives for about 3x the cost per terabyte, which would pay itself off quickly with the energy reduction. The other reason is that I ended up going a little overboard; I have about 56x3TB drives right now, which is a lot more than 16, so I needed to get a couple of JBOD expansions to put them in, each of which were like $250 -- if I had gotten fewer, larger drives, I'd have had another $500 to work with & be saving on energy.

Another thing I'd have done differently is get fewer but larger sticks of memory. I have a really nice amount of RAM right now, but the energy consumption with 24x8GB isn't worth the upfront savings compared to getting 16 or 32GB DIMMs.

All the storage is in OpenZFS on Linux. The 56x3TB drives are configured as 7 RAIDZ2 vdevs, so 2 drives each are for redundancy, and 6 for actual usable storage. This leaves me with a bit over 100TB of usable space. And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.

I am sure I could have done a bunch better, but, so far, everything has been lightning fast and reliable.

I am using ZFSBootMenu [5] as my bootloader. It's cool since it is basically a tiny Linux distro that lives in your EFI and comes with a recent version of ZFS, so you can store your entire OS, including your actual kernel and such in ZFS, and you can enable all sorts of ZFS features that GRUB doesn't support, etc.

This is nice because, since the entire OS is living in ZFS, when I take snapshots, it is always of a bootable, working state, and ZFSBootMenu lets me roll-back to a selected snapshot from within the bootloader.

The Supermicro board has a slot for a SATA DOM [6], which is sort of like the form fact of an SD card. I picked up the smallest, cheapest one I could on eBay for like $15 and use that to store my bootloader. I did this so that my tiny 128GB SSDs that I use for my OS could be given to ZFS directly for simplicity instead of having to carve out a small boot partition, etc.

All in all, I'm probably out about $1750 for >100TB usable, redundant, fast storage, and a decent bit of power for virtualization and whatever else. It costs me like $50ish a month in electricity because of all the drives and DIMMs. But I was already paying 65 euros a month for a 4x8TB server from LeaseWeb to use as a seedbox, and ran out of space, so it's been worth it, even with my dumb decision to use 3TB drives.

[1]: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/3u/836/sc836b...>

[2]: https://www.supermicro.com/products/archive/motherboard/x9dr...>

[3]: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?forums/for-sale-fo...>

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4SnKAP6cQ>

[5]: https://zfsbootmenu.org>

[6]: https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm>

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Edit: Also, figured it'd be worth mentioning, but the way I got the chassis+motherboard+cpu bundle for such a decent price was by posting my own thread. So, if anyone reading this is broke like me and not finding anything suitable, that is an option.

You won't always find exactly what you're looking for if you just browse around. But I've always had good luck explaining my situation, my budget, my goals, and someone tends to have stuff they don't need.

eBay seems to be pretty useless right now for the chassises (chasses? chassi? I give up) due to memecoin Chia miners. Forums are your best bet if you don't want to pay scalper rates.

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