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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

#181

Post by szundi »

tarunmuvvala wrote: post #176
czhu12 wrote: post #165

The mental gymnastics happening in this thread to justify pirating books is pretty disappointing. Especially on HN, where I think a lot of our livelihoods depend on writing and charging for closed source code that can technically be infinitely distributed. How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy, and then leave a PayPal link in the footer asking f…

Similar is the case from people who can't afford. They are not asking you to give it for free. What they want is that the information accessible at affordable prices. The current situation is an ABC book either cost $10-$20-$30 or they can get it pirated. there is no middle ground. People move to piracy due to lack of affordability and options.

In eastern europe sometimes it is the lack of legal options to actually access content. Example: star wars shows were unaccessible in any way other, academia papers, lots of books are not translated and published etc.

Not making a moral judgement, just adding color.

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

#182

Post by comex »

chocolatkey wrote: post #125
idontwantthis wrote: post #7

Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe's shitty app, you can't share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow. I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!

As someone who works in the ebook sector, I'll say that no one loves Adobe's DRM, whether it be the publisher, vendor or user. It's implemented by apps and such because of the network effect - other apps support it, and users want to be able to read Adobe DRMed content without trouble, and it was also the first big solution to the "problem" of ebook DRM. However, because people have to pay a fee to Adobe per license,…

Hadn't heard of LCP before. Based on some skimming of the website… how does it improve on Adobe's DRM other than cost?

It's still limited to applications that explicitly support it. Maybe there will be a wider ecosystem than Adobe's. But my current preferred reader apps all either have built-in storefronts (Kindle, Apple Books) or are open source (Calibre and Google Chrome, so I can use a Japanese dictionary extension). The former category probably won't ever support LCP, and the latter category definitely won't.

And as for longevity… who's to say LCP will still be around in 10 years or 20? At least Adobe has a big brand name.

At the end of the day, I'll keep using de-DRM plugins to get around those problems, but that's a solution that only works for people who are relatively tech savvy, not your average reader. And I'm not sure DRM will always be as ineffective as it is today.

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

#183

Post by charondust »

pilimi_anna wrote: post #126
pilimi_anna wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I'm Anna, the one who made the backup). We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at http://pilimi.org (we'll set up a patreon-like system soon)

Note that their TOR domains are still up: http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52... and http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...

yes, and you can try to send the link to the email first and then download it in the email. It works.

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

#186

Post by books-r-free »

czhu12 wrote: post #165

The mental gymnastics happening in this thread to justify pirating books is pretty disappointing. Especially on HN, where I think a lot of our livelihoods depend on writing and charging for closed source code that can technically be infinitely distributed. How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy, and then leave a PayPal link in the footer asking f…

> How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy

I would, as, in most cases, code alone doesn't really make money.

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

#187

Post by idontwantthis »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #136
orbital-decay wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because someday either that DRM will be obsolete or Adobe itself will die. The probability of that is 1, so it's guaranteed.

No doubt, but I'm questioning the timeframe. > you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow

I meant it is inevitable and uncertain, and will be sudden.

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

#188

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

tarunmuvvala wrote: post #176
czhu12 wrote: post #165

The mental gymnastics happening in this thread to justify pirating books is pretty disappointing. Especially on HN, where I think a lot of our livelihoods depend on writing and charging for closed source code that can technically be infinitely distributed. How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy, and then leave a PayPal link in the footer asking f…

Similar is the case from people who can't afford. They are not asking you to give it for free. What they want is that the information accessible at affordable prices. The current situation is an ABC book either cost $10-$20-$30 or they can get it pirated. there is no middle ground. People move to piracy due to lack of affordability and options.

Ah, the downvotes from the extremely privileged (most of whom do not even realize this).

I am from one of those countries where we pretty much cannot afford "legal" content. In my shitty town the median salary is something like $300, at least half of which goes towards paying rent if you don't have your own house, while we're being asked to pay prices that were established for developed countries with median salaries at 10× of ours or above.

Steam is one of very few exceptions and it's really popular here even among students and such (just like everywhere else).

Basically, if you want to charge me $50 for the book, you're not losing anything, simply because I cannot afford it anyway. Imagine if you had to pay $500 for books, $600 for movies, etc.

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

#189

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

Rimintil wrote: post #112
1123581321 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the impact is different. The library doesn't pay for the ebook just once. When the library buys the ebook, they're allowed to lend it a certain number of times before they have to buy the book again. Or they pay for a number of lends per day and payments for the books checked out are distributed to the appropriate publishers. The relationship between physical book checkouts and author/publisher revenue is less di…

> The relationship between physical book checkouts and author/publisher revenue is less direct Indeed. The publisher charges universities etc. a one time lump sum to purchase N copies of a book. The author gets next to nothing. Source: am an author of technical books. Royalties will buy me a few cardboard boxes.

why do we need "publishers" in today's market?is not like you have to have 4 intermediaries to sell on amazon or even digital copies? i'd be more forthcoming to pay $10 for a book that i know 50-70-90% proceeds go to the author than 2-4-5% which the rest take up?

publishers, printers, yada yada must've been important to sell books 50 years ago but are they really necessary today?

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

#190

Post by alwayslikethis »

dougk16 wrote: post #62
judge2020 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Does anyone do this? I don't see how it's relevant beyond "wow! you reading speed increased 5% this month" in emails from the Kindle service. Maybe they target ads for "read better and faster in 90 days" if you're in the 10th percentile on reading speed?

For all the bigger companies I've worked with that have infinite war chests and rely heavily on user data and analytics, the question is always why shouldn't a specific metric be tracked, not why should it. Even if they have absolutely no reason to track how fast you're reading, it's safe to say they're tracking it anyway. At a certain point you stop reading privacy policies or listening to what a company says it's d…

That's the main reason I refuse to buy DRM'd content. It gives the companies too much control and ability to track whatever I might be doing. I'll gladly pay for good books, but I am not paying Amazon or whatever to fund their data collection megaoperation
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