Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

3lib.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 543 posts

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

#221

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #209
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> why do we need "publishers" in today's market? Distributing and marketing a book still takes expertise.

ah, so the one who is supposed to make money from his/her skill is given pittance while distribution and marketing people take the cake. fine.

edit:

if onlyfans can allow questionable skills be monetized and give millions to the um, performers, surely an author can find a way to sell their own books themselves

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

#222

Post by notch656a »

skissane wrote: post #207
bytm3 wrote: post #26

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service supports and protects the U.S. Postal Service and its customers by enforcing the laws that defend the nation’s mail system from illegal or dangerous use. What do they have to do with ebooks??

> What do they have to do with ebooks?? I think legally they can investigate whatever (alleged) crimes they want – subject to the outcome of any turf wars with other government agencies. Their official purpose may be to investigate one particular category of crimes, but it is unlikely any court is going to throw out a prosecution because the "wrong" agency gathered the evidence. Government agencies are frequently try…

Authorizing funding is the responsibility of the legislative branch. Wouldn't the agencies, which are executive, need to follow the prescription of congress on use of funds to investigate?

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

#223

Post by gilded-lilly »

areoform wrote: post #220
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)

Thank you so much for your efforts! I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it. Something that, - is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion) - requires no power - doesn't require software to read/reboot from - (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve the…

Why not encode them microscopically, using some kind of easily decipherable code?

The main issue would be loss of language. You’d end up with a gigantic Rosetta Stone of indecipherable gibberish.

Better would be to convert all literature into hieroglyphics, or graphic novels (or both), and then etch them microscopically.

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

#225

Post by kergonath »

night-rider wrote: post #21
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!

> I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase! Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don't want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.

The music industry used to think the same way. We need the equivalent of the iTunes Music Store to make the no-DRM situation normal.

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

#226

Post by bheadmaster »

1dry wrote: post #208
bawolff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ick. I'm sympathetic to piracy, but the moment people start to make money off of pirated works it starts to feel much mo…

Quoted post unavailable.

Because digital copyright is artificial scarcity.

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

#227

Post by midoridensha »

klodolph wrote: post #166
hutzlibu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> (unless we are talking about historical books) You should not touch historical books with gloves. It is generally correct to use your bare hands. The reason why you would wear gloves while handling a book is to protect you, perhaps because the book has been contaminated with hazardous chemicals or something. Anyway. It is also my experience that some people completely destroy their books. I don't know how it happen…

>It is also my experience that some people completely destroy their books. I don't know how it happens. I don't think of myself as careful with books. I shove them in backpacks, insert random objects to remember my place, take them outdoors, etc. Yet somehow, the books look much the same afterwards.

Yep, this is me too, and with everything else I own too. I don't treat them like museum objects, but they generally look very good even after lots of use.

Some people just can't do this. Honestly, I don't know why. It's just how they are. Maybe they don't have an intuitive sense of how much force is really needed to handle things, and they use far too much? Much like a small child. I'm not sure. Hence my use of the term in another post, "clumsy oaf".

You can see this with some people's cars too. You get in a normal person's car that's a few years old, and it looks fine, though maybe the seating surfaces are obviously not brand-new and it's not perfectly clean. But you get in one of these oaf's cars, and even after a year, it's completely destroyed inside and the interior looks like it's decades old.

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

#228

Post by faeriechangling »

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…

Using Amazon as a way to donate to authors when it takes 70% of the cut (authors get less for physical books) and delivers an inferior service to zlibrary is absurd. That’s not morality, that’s servitude. At least PayPal only takes a few percent.

If you feel bad about privacy, pay a random author half the Amazon price of your library and you’ll be a better person than somebody who meekishly shovels Bezos a ton of money in misguided morality. One that makes reading an exclusive right of the wealthy.

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

#229

Post by bawolff »

hutzlibu wrote: post #161
bawolff wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dipping your book in sea water is not normal "heavy use". If you do that to your library book the library will probably make you purchase a new one. Anyways the reason to treat library books reasonably nicely (not with gloves, but like a reasonable person) is not because books are sacred. Its because library books are not yours, they are something you are borrowing from someone else. Treating other people's possesion…

"If you do that to your library book the library will probably make you purchase a new one." Sure thing, which is why I would not do this with libary or borrowed books in general, but rather buy it cheap second hand, before I take them to the beach with me. "Treating other people's possesions that you are borrowing with respect is just common courtsey." Sure thing. I was refering to the general habit of rough use of…

Fair enough, i probably shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. If its your own book (and not a rare book), by all means do whatever you want with it.

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

#230

Post by 1dry »

wardedVibe wrote: post #218
1dry wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I just want a copy of the thing I paid for that I can use on whatever machine in whatever way I want without a bunch of bullshit hoops

No post body was provided.
Post reply on HN