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Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

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Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#211

Post by dunstad »

bumbledraven wrote: post #41
toomuchtodo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are providers [1] that will destructively scan the book for you and return a PDF. If you want to preserve the book, you're stuck using a scanning rig [2]. The Internet Archive will also non-destructively scan as part of Open Library [3], but they only permit one checkout at a time of scanned works, and the latency can be high between sending them a book and it becoming available. FYI, 600 DPI is preferred for a…

A big +1 for 1dollarscan.com. They've scanned many hundreds of books for me. The quality of the resulting PDFs is uniformly excellent, their turnaround time is fast, and their prices are cheap ($1 per 100 pages). I've visited their office -- located in an inexpensive industrial district of San Jose -- on multiple occasions. They have a convenient process for receiving books in person. I believe the owners are Japanes…

> quiet, neat, and über-efficient

I wish the same could be said for the Tokyo office I work in!

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#212

Post by iwalton3 »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #152
washadjeffmad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't care about warranty, 8 and 12TB drives routinely go for $15/TB on sale inside WD Elements. I picked up 32TB for just under $500 with discount over the holiday that way.

Even if you shuck the drive, as long as you keep the enclosure Western Digital will still honor the warranty.

I’ve heard that you can send the drives back without the enclosure and they have still honored the warranty. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/am9vdv/easysto...

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#213

Post by avgeek23 »

jdnenej wrote: post #198
Symbiote wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not hosting a copy of this at work (where we easily have 32TB on old hardware) since distributing it is copyright infringement. The same goes for my home connection.

Most people don't care. The chance anything at all bad will happen is so incredibly low.

This isn't even movies wherein some large studio's can send notices. I don't think publishing houses have that many funds to send so many legal notices.

Books are a safe bet to pirate

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#214

Post by frobozz »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #200
frobozz wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wonder wither digital or analogue formats are better able to survive into the distant future. There are 5000 year old clay tablets we can still read. There are centuries old documents on paper, vellum etc. that we can still read. I personally have decades-old paper documents I can easily read, and a box of floppies I can't. It's not just a problem of unreadable physical media, I have a database file on a perfe…

No one is proposing we use floppy disks. Redundant, shared servers ARE a forever solution. Making sure your data is one one of the ones that makes it seems like a vastly easier proposition to me than writing data to clay tablets and trying to keep those from ending up in a dump somewhere.

What is the likelihood that historians a century or two hence will have an application capable of turning an ISO 32000-1 file into a human-readable text?

If we are talking about archaeologists, rather than historians, even ASCII and Unicode could be a challenge to work out.

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#215

Post by gdy »

mikorym wrote: post #210
alteria wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their policies were for more than "restrictive" is how I'm reading it See [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov...

Yes. I'm saying restrictive to describe the effect on academic papers. The effect on (oppression of) the academics themselves was much worse.

No, that's BS.

There are well known cases of genetics and cybernetics being banned for ideological reasons during Stalin's time. Scientific books and articles of convicted 'enemies of the state' were dangerous to possess in that time too. Some scientists used ideological 'arguments' in scientific debates which were dangerous to argue against.

But all that, AFAIK, ended after Stalin's death in 1953.

Moreover, I've never heard anything about mathematics in this regard.

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#216

Post by Freak_NL »

avgeek23 wrote: post #213
jdnenej wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care. The chance anything at all bad will happen is so incredibly low.

This isn't even movies wherein some large studio's can send notices. I don't think publishing houses have that many funds to send so many legal notices. Books are a safe bet to pirate

That's what people said about music and films too. You don't want to be the next Jammie Thomas.

This is an existential threat to the deep-pocketed likes of Elsevier et al. They will use the law to make an example of anyone too close to their sphere of influence; so if you are in the US or the EU; support the efforts of LibGen vocally and loudly, and contribute anonymously, but don't risk your neck to the extent where they can get a hold of you.

There are plenty of ways to support the effort safely though. Make sure people who wish to access scientific papers and books know where to go, and make sure your elected officials know about the need for publicly funded science to be published free of charge, open access, (retroactively too).

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#217

Post by L_Rahman »

Freak_NL wrote: post #216
avgeek23 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even movies wherein some large studio's can send notices. I don't think publishing houses have that many funds to send so many legal notices. Books are a safe bet to pirate

That's what people said about music and films too. You don't want to be the next Jammie Thomas. This is an existential threat to the deep-pocketed likes of Elsevier et al. They will use the law to make an example of anyone too close to their sphere of influence; so if you are in the US or the EU; support the efforts of LibGen vocally and loudly, and contribute anonymously, but don't risk your neck to the extent where…

I'm guessing a pretty significant minority of HN's users maintain offshore seed boxes to get other copyrighted content and for them it might be pretty trivial to add partial peering of libgen content.

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#218

Post by mikorym »

gdy wrote: post #215
mikorym wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'm saying restrictive to describe the effect on academic papers. The effect on (oppression of) the academics themselves was much worse.

No, that's BS. There are well known cases of genetics and cybernetics being banned for ideological reasons during Stalin's time. Scientific books and articles of convicted 'enemies of the state' were dangerous to possess in that time too. Some scientists used ideological 'arguments' in scientific debates which were dangerous to argue against. But all that, AFAIK, ended after Stalin's death in 1953. Moreover, I've nev…

Not sure what you are saying. Mathematicians were not even allowed to travel abroad [1] and any "concessions" were essentially as it pleased the USSR state. Only from 1990 was movement free in the true sense of the word.

[1] An example was when Margulis won the Fields medal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Margulis. There are many other examples too.

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#219

Post by ausbah »

a1369209993 wrote: post #189
rollinDyno wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry that if this system becames permanent, one in which it is practically impossible to stop piracy, followed by the loss of traditional incentives we might find ourselves in a place where no motivated investor will break even when producing quality and innocuous content.

"Motivated investors" don't produce quality content anyway; they produce mass-market swill like Twilight or Game of Thrones.

Most people use sites like these to pirate the "swill" you despite so much.

Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down

#220

Post by zaarn »

asdff wrote: post #175
knolax wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but 90 percent of the 1567 manuscript survived until the Second Opium War in the Qing dynasty. In 1860, the Anglo-French invasion of Beijing resulted in extensive burning and looting of the city,[16] with the British and French soldiers taking large portions of the manuscript as souvenirs. Preservation is easy if you don't get invaded.

It's easy if you anticipate these things. Who put the dead sea scrolls in that cave in the middle of nowhere? Not someone who went in and forgot their scroll one day. Someone who had the foresight that this would be a safe space in the face of who knows what future threat. And it payed off.

I doubt it was that intentional. I would wager that "someone forgot about it" is the more likely explanation.
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