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

3lib.net

61–70 of 543 posts

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

#61

bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion still up on TOR. fuck them i aint paying for my textbooks. never had a book bill higher than $50 and not about to start now.

Am I the only one who believes the high textbook pricing are reasonable given the small consumer base?

'textbook' covers a lot of ground--it could mean something widely used in a lot of schools, or something hyper-specialized. It could be a book that needed a lot of editorial and production work, or none at all.

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

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 doing or not. You even stop looking at code or inspecting network traffic. You simply assume you're being tracked in every technical way it's possible for "them" to do so, and you either accept it or change it.

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM-free eBooks do exist, don't lump them all together!

Yes they do but it's extremely hard to find drm free books.

Ironically, I've found many of the publishers will sell DRM-free ebooks. The biggest problem I've found is books out of print but still in copyright, since we have absurdly long copyright lengths today.

The "ebook shops" are the worst. Amazon & Apple have their DRM'd copies, and Kobo may be even worse.

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they need a ".ru" domain, or some us-unfriendly country then?

that might work, yes. I wouldn't expect it to last forever though because the US gov doesn't like jurisdictions that evade their power. Russians could seize it if they felt like it too. I have some experience with that. Ideally you would exploit bad diplomatic relations between nations to keep things running. Mutually non cooperative jurisdictions can actually be good for the internet. I do think the intention of the…

to, is, su, etc. There are enough TLDs to last a lifetime for a pirate site operator.

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

#65

bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion still up on TOR. fuck them i aint paying for my textbooks. never had a book bill higher than $50 and not about to start now.

Am I the only one who believes the high textbook pricing are reasonable given the small consumer base?

How much does it cost to make a textbook and have a few editors? There are on average about 20 million college students in the US and for core books and common fields there are tens or hundreds of thousands of students taking those courses every semester. 50,000 students can easily cover the authoring and editing of a textbook and still reap a massive profit with a small fee of $20 per book.

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

#66
All books should now have a link or paypal email at the back book cover so whoever read the book without pay, then find it useful and valuable, to have an effective way to send money over.

yeah it's not ideal but, there might be quite some readers pay if they know how to do that easily.

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

#67
post #57
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If my local library already owns the book and it is not checked out, what is the difference between driving there to check it out and downloading it illegally online? The impact to the author is the same: absolutely nothing.

Libraries use checkout frequency to determine which books to stock and which books to stock more of. The more an author's books are checked out of a library, the more likely that library is to buy more copies of that book, as well as more copies of other books by that author.

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

#68
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.

I think you described one scenario that's not representative of all the issues, and then a reader might accidentally think the "it's all very silly" is the takehome message for all the issues.

Also, as a lawyer, couldn't you come up with some a decent counterargument re moral differences, if you had to?

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

#69
post #57
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If my local library already owns the book and it is not checked out, what is the difference between driving there to check it out and downloading it illegally online? The impact to the author is the same: absolutely nothing.

As the previous commenter has already said, the author has been paid already in the first case. That's a material difference.

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

#70
post #57
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If my local library already owns the book and it is not checked out, what is the difference between driving there to check it out and downloading it illegally online? The impact to the author is the same: absolutely nothing.

In addition to the sale, a popular library is a library that buys more and more books and doesn't get shuttered.
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