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

3lib.net

451–460 of 543 posts

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

#451
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've always said that onlyfans is one of the more ethical platforms; there's less of a question of who gets paid and how.

so what is the role of publishers and marketers and whole dinosaur industry that should die already.

i've had a proposal. From a $100 physical book, an author makes say 5%. That is all their work as the original work and remuneration they get so if we move to digital, how about the author double or triple that to say $15. add another $5 for delivery and the same book now costs me $20 and the author gets "more" money, something they actually want and what i want, to consume the content created and support the author and be easy on the wallet. this would probably kill the paper book model overnight but i really don't have concerns about the poor publishers and printers who would go out of job

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

#452
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbook prices are outrageous, I am not paying for a £60 textbook that I will only use for the question banks

> £60 Boy, wouldn't that be nice. A standard calculus book costs $200 in America. Or, £178 (RIP pounds)

I am in the stage below higher education (equivalent to SAT's), meaning most pupils don't have jobs or have only been in work for a few months (A National insurance number is given at 16 and is needed to enter work), we have 3 / 4 subjects on average and 2 books per subject which is about £420 in total, however the UK is pretty facilitating to low income households and provides them with grants to afford the costs, we do have a school library meaning we can take out books, but we have to return them within a short window of time and we cannot write on them which makes them redundant for some subjects.

Am a pretentious whiner?, Yes. Will I keep on pirating textbooks? Yes

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

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs are not the problem. We can barely get to the Moon and have no realistic prospect of making a self-sustaining Mars colony any time soon. How is it credible to claim we can build starships that can cross lightyears without technological or sociopolitical problems? The engines - which we're nowhere close to creating - are the easy part.

Getting to the moon only takes another JFK. We have the tech, we have the people, all we lack is the budget and a 5-10 year deadline. Also, another hard part is getting there safely enough. A 5% chance of dying out there is probably not acceptable nowadays. We probably need to go below 0.1% to attempt it again, and that's not trivial, especially with the possibility of solar flares beyond the magnetic protection of t…

> is it worth making it a priority

It will follow by itself once space mining kicks off.

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

#454

z-lib.org is responsible for me buying more books in the past couple years than I’ve ever bought. It essentially acted like an in-person bookstore for me that allowed me to browse a book to determine whether it was worth buying. Before z-lib, I generally tended toward avoiding wasting money. I guess I’m back to that again. (I like paper copies of tech books and Kindle copies of novels so I can sync reading and highli…

Although I have grown increasingly frustrated with the Kindle ecosystem, I don't think this is a fair complaint. Amazon lets you download a sample of any book in their library, which is usually pretty substantial -- can be multiple chapters depending on the length of the book. I use this mechanism as my "shopping cart" where I just freely download samples of books that seem even slightly interesting. Later I can brow…

Everyone's different. You find that a sample that Amazon chooses for you is sufficient for you. OP finds that physically picking up the book and looking at whatever they want is sufficient for them.

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

#455

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!

Why is it guaranteed? I have been buying ebooks for more than 10 years and they still work.

Obxkcd: https://xkcd.com/488/>

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

#456
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but they didn’t even try preserving it! Lots were found in average storerooms and so on.

When there's a lot of things to start with, there's bound to be a lot of things to survive by chance even without preserving. A lot of the stuff that survived was accidentally preserved by nature.

You could say that, but I would point out to its resilience and suitability as a medium for long term information containment. Literally thousands upon thousands have been found. Imagine if one were to try make it last longer :)

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

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Instead of metal plates with a clear coat, maybe laser etching diamonds? a 5cm square of diamond can store 25 exabytes of data. They will weight less then metal as well. https://newatlas.com/electronics/2-inch-diamond-wafers-quant...

> a 5cm square of diamond can store 25 exabytes of data

isn't the same idea viable if applied to silicon crystals (which we already grow lots of)?

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

#459

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 too don't like waiting at stoplights or following the rules we agree to to make society work if they are inconvenient for me. Forcing people to wear masks over COVID sure was more inconvenient than having to read in an app, right? F society! F trying to all live together!
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