U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures

https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-hits-z-library-with-new-domain-name-seizures-230505/

by nickthegreek • 3 years ago

281 179 3 years ago

torrentfreak.com

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

Use the tor/onion ones, always fine.

yiamvino• 3 years ago

downloading from onion exposes your location not always advisable :)

jwilk• 3 years ago

How come?

anonymouscaller2• 3 years ago

How? It's Tor, the Onion cannot see your IP.

bandrami• 3 years ago

As opposed to using the clearweb?

cik2• 3 years ago

What bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I run into several headaches, and it's no longer feasible to buy books.

* Amazon shut off bookdepository.com

* Amazon.com just won't ship many books here.

* Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.

* Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here.

* Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.

Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books.

The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.

brink• 3 years ago

Could be an opportunity for a business?

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

The how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows what other terms they can come up with.

I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

Yeah, it's stupid. Copyright industry pretty much defeats itself with their licensing nonsense that nobody cares about. Anything short of everything humanity has ever created in one place at negligible costs fails to compete with copyright infringement.

AlotOfReading2• 3 years ago

From the perspective of a consumer, the only real difference between a library and zlib is that "checkouts" aren't time-limited. So why aren't there any good, copyright-respecting digital libraries out there? The simple answer is that publishers either completely prohibit library usage of their ebooks, or have such onerous licensing terms that libraries can't afford to maintain large collections [1].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702

internetter8• 3 years ago

I also pirate things. Often. I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy.

Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home.

I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the book, I guess.

And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I pirated it, then decided to buy it.

It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just not to pay.

[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-being...

Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the book and credits the ebook my account.

Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.

pierat• 3 years ago

Indeed!

I have 4 library bookshelves (7 foot tall ones). And they're packed with books. *Bought* books.

But dealing with more current "online books" are a fraud. They 'sell' these books, but in actuality they're rentals due to DRM. I cant read them on Linux; I cant sell them; I cant read them on my phone; I can't print past their arbitrary print limits.

I have none of the same rights of these physical books.

So, yeah, I'll pirate.

nunuvit3• 3 years ago

I have legal, instant access to nearly every technical publication I need in digital form, but I still illegally download almost everything. It's much faster to get the docs, I don't have to slog through crippled page navigation or search, and they don't cut me off because I've opened too many research papers in one day to see if any of them actually answer my question.

The music and TV/film industries figured out how to get people to pay. The print industry can figure it out too.

scarmig2• 3 years ago

Put a unique QR code in each physical book in some standardized location (probably the publisher's imprint page). Then, someone can scan it to purchase it. The bookstore then gets a cut of the purchase. It would even work browsing a friend's bookshelf or a library.

Seems like it'd be a win for consumers, publishers, and bookstores all alike, and it doesn't seem too complicated to implement technically.

pnzrdrgoon• 3 years ago

Tabletop RPG publishers are making inroads towards making digital versions of books available with purchase of physical books from indie games shops. Whenever I'm looking for a new TTRPG book I always first ask my Friendly Local Game Shops if they're in the Bits & Mortar program and it influences where I purchase. Even if the shop isn't part of the program many of the publishers will now send a PDF if you send them a picture of the receipt (shout out to Free League Publishing for being awesome about this).

https://www.bits-and-mortar.com/

thinkmassive3• 3 years ago

No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough

Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the entire book, but only a small section of it at a time is “descrambled” in the live view.

On more than one occasion I’ve used this to look up some specific topic, which was immediately viewable (and unblocked me on that problem), then gone on to purchase the book because I know it’s high quality and I’m likely to refer to it in the future for other reasons.

https://www.manning.com/

gameshot911• 3 years ago

I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy.

"forced"

You say that as if your hands are bound.

Creators have an intrinsic right to distribute their work as they see fit.

You do not have an intrinsic right to it.

If you don't like their terms, then your right is to not consume it. NOT to steal it.

If you decide to thieve, then that's your call.

Just don't pretend it's being "forced" upon you.

BlackjackCF• 3 years ago

I think it’s wild that publishers don’t do something like pay an extra dollar if you’re buying the hard copy and also get the ebook.

It’s also wild that the ebook is often as expensive as a hard copy.

bombcar• 3 years ago

I wonder if someone in the USA could setup a "piracy forgiveness service" where they accept amazon orders of books and movies and just immediately shred them.

StanislavPetrov• 3 years ago

The same can be said for the absolutely awful way that "smart" tvs work these days. A friend of mine has a "smart" tv and pays over $400 a month for cable tv and a huge variety of streaming services in order to watch all the things he wants to watch. Many times we have tried (and failed) to navigate the dizzying array of networks and services in an attempt to watch a game or a fight that should be legitimately able to watch due to his paid subscriptions, only to give up and end up pirating it because it was unavailable and/or too much of a hassle.

masfuerte• 3 years ago

Doesn't Israel have bookshops?

mynameisvlad• 3 years ago

Just like any country with an official language other than English, I would expect them to have bookstores full of Hebrew books, with a small section of English books that you've probably already read.

The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst English and French speakers living here".

bwb• 3 years ago

ya this... as far as i know they have plenty?

jraby33• 3 years ago

You cannot compare the ability to purchase over a million books online to the selection at a bookstore. Plus my personal preference is reading books on my phone, not as an actual book.

cik2• 3 years ago

Indeed - and I purchase all of my Hebrew books and magazines there. If we're lucky the chains will bring in ~50 English books per quarter, and eventually sell them all off. These 50 books are usually ~5 Harry Potter, ~10 kid fantasy, and a random smattering of other things. They will not special order.

I can actually order a book on Amazon, to a drop shipper in the US, DHS it to Israel for less than the price of special ordering the book here, via צומת ספרים, assuming they even want to allow the special order.

Suffice it to say people don't try. There are two English book stores in the country (and a French one) that will go out of their way to work with you. They run into the geographic frustrations put in place by publishers. It's a mess.

dilap• 3 years ago

Yeah, I started out buying stuff. The DRM eventually inevitably fucks up and steals the item from me.

Fuck it, they've failed to uphold their end of the bargain -- now I pirate, unless there is DRM-free content available for purchase.

iudqnolq• 3 years ago

If you wanted you could also purchase and strip DRM. All the big ones are cracked.

AdmiralAsshat• 3 years ago

* Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here.

Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can do is change the Billing Information on your account so that your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info. But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that have used this method). It should go through and purchase the book.

The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.

toyg2• 3 years ago

The point is that you should not have to hack your way through this or that payment system, because sooner or later the hack will be blocked and you will lose access even to stuff you paid for. It's not even a hypothetical, the parent poster brings clear examples of this happening multiple times.

SN76477• 3 years ago

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

mmh0000• 3 years ago

This quote is incredibly true for me. I used to (like 2 decades ago) pirate everything. Then Steam came along, and it is just so easy to buy things, and I don't have to worry about malware keygens or no-cd hacks. I haven't pirated a game since 2005.

I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

It is! Steam is great service and makes me gladly pay for games without any qualms.

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

It's so true. In the case where price actually is the issue, then it ceases to be a piracy problem, since they likely couldn't afford to pay anyway. No customer lost in many cases.

YeBanKo• 3 years ago

Did Amazon remove your “purchases” from your device simply because you no longer have a US card??

akvadrako• 3 years ago

I don't understand why you can't use libgen, which has quite an extensive collection. Why only Z-library?

rabite2• 3 years ago

Z-Library has more books. Z-Library contains every book within Libgen plus books that have been uploaded by Z-Library's userbase and never made it to Libgen.

Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the entire contents of their library. I have a number of things that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new references within the body of text to published books. I have reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.

jraby33• 3 years ago

Way more books in z-library. When Z goes down it’s painful to go back to libgen.

kennend32• 3 years ago

Adding to this, region restrictions on video content.

There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in the US?

In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another subscription?

There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"?

After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect people would do?

Spoom• 3 years ago

In my experience, usually Prime content is on Crave in Canada. But a whole lot of Canada just has a pirate Kodi box anyway.

jdougan2• 3 years ago

To be fair, that is probably partially fallout from the Canadian content regulations and possibly other law regarding corporate ownership. Not sure because it has been over two decades since I was current in that stuff.

dudul2• 3 years ago

Same for me. I'm not buying books full of DRMs, that I can only read on one specific device and what not. F-that.

And since I don't like pirating, I just read books in the public domain.

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

Can always do both. Buy a copy and then immediately pirate it. Still fund your author but actually gain the ability to use the thing.

crazygringo• 3 years ago

Why not Library Genesis?

Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never contributed additional books in their collection back to Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor.

But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?

internetter8• 3 years ago

Z-Library is easier to use. I've always struggled to find what I need on libgen. Now we have Anna's Archive[0] though, which is wonderful

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive

pid-1• 3 years ago

I learned bookbinding, now I print my own books and make pretty hardcovers as a hobby. Highly recommend.

jraby33• 3 years ago

I also live in Israel and have the same exact problems. I probably spend $5k a year on books but just cannot deal with the headache of trying to purchase a book and failing. VPNs, changing my iTunes Store location, just an absolutely frustrating experience for absolutely no good reason.

reaperducer• 3 years ago

Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library.

Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from my library that it's switching to another system because Overdrive is going out of business.

Nifty3929• 3 years ago

Honest question: Why does Amazon (and others) restrict or block services in Israel? I'm genuinely curious what their reasoning might be.

scrum-treats• 3 years ago

Here, try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656.

bookpeople• 3 years ago

Hi Cik

If there was a service that caters to you for buying books, would you use the service?

user39393822• 3 years ago

Corporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves are corrupt, what meaningful laws do manage to exist are not enforced correctly due to these revolving doors. So when corporations hurt the People in major ways on a daily basis, nothing from the government, in fact the government is systemically complicit.

But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared.

It's sickening to watch.

mysterydip• 3 years ago

Amazing how quickly the justice department works for certain interests.

206lol2• 3 years ago

Many people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.

snickerbockers• 3 years ago

I don't even get how the hell copyright infringement became a matter of criminal law. If you're distributing a product that infringes on somebody's IP in a way which negatively impacts their profits, that is (by which i mean "should be") a matter of civil law and they can sue for damages. Why the hell should law enforcement get involved at all?

theyeenzbeanz• 3 years ago

There’s a video of double dribble game glitch for the NES. Fox/family guy decided to rip it for their show and copyright struck the original video. So they don’t even do anything to corporations ripping of people’s works.

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

The US Trade Representative publishes a literal naughty list of countries whose efforts to combat infringement it deems insufficient. The document is filled with language such as "stakeholders report this", "shareholders are concerned about that". Corporations leveraging the might of the US government to sanction other countries that have better things to do than police imaginary american property.

Sickening doesn't even begin to describe it.

hgs33• 3 years ago

Its called crony capitalism [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

CapstanRoller5• 3 years ago

That's redundant and an invocation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The cronyism is an inherent feature of capitalism, not a bug. There are no real-world examples of non-crony capitalism.

The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and only gets worse.

hn_throawlles• 3 years ago

let corporations exist without human participation... ahahahah interesting times

nceqs3• 3 years ago

Piracy is wrong. The amount of coping people will do to justify it is incredible to watch.

AlotOfReading2• 3 years ago

The first sale doctrine that libraries rely on doesn't exist for digital media, so how would you propose build a "morally acceptable" digital library?

* You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others.

* You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason.

* You can't do it by buying a distribution license because some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those.

* You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending. Internet archive tried that.

The current situation today requires either paying perpetual, recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as is already the case at most local libraries.

sneak4• 3 years ago

There's nothing wrong or bad about copying digital information.

kwere• 3 years ago

paywalling art & culture is wrong, imagine paying a license fee on the use of the italian pizza culture, on the catholic bible, on songs and works of arts like images of paintings bcs people could/should go to the museum and pay to see the paintins. Obviously commercial uses of third parties intellectual propriety should be regulated and enforced.

quadrifoliate• 3 years ago

It's because we as the general public don't do anything to counter-lobby.

When was the last time you wrote to your congresspersons about this overreach?

zlibfan• 3 years ago

zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion

justinclift2• 3 years ago

That's a different onion address to what they seem to be publishing on their front page.

teddyh• 3 years ago

Redirects to loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhembyd.onion

justinclift2• 3 years ago

Ouch. That's sounds potentially nefarious. :(

snvzz2• 3 years ago

This is the URL I have in my notes.

generalizations• 3 years ago

Seems to me that the storage TB/$ is rising at least slightly faster than the total size of these kinds of archives. I wonder how long it will be until we can feasibly keep personal copies of zlib (and libgen, and scihub).

How big is the z library archive, anyway?

anonymouscaller2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure how large z-lib is, but LibGen is ~120TB. You can pick up a 5TB external HDD on Amazon for ~$100, so it would cost a good $2400 dollars for the raw storage costs if you wanted to host it all yourself. You really have to wonder how the owners fund all of this.

Edit: fixed my math

lostmsu4• 3 years ago

You made a mistake somewhere. 120/5*100 is only $2400

Also, there are plenty of drives with under $10/TB listed here some looking legit: https://diskprices.com/

So it is actually only $1200

wkat4242• 3 years ago

Libgen is mostly stored on ipfs.

knodi123• 3 years ago

You really have to wonder how the owners fund all of this.

Donation drive?

https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-raises-tens-of-thousands-...

832• 3 years ago

I run a 36 bay supermicro server I got for $900 on ebay which could easily host all this. I buy used 6tb sas drives off ebay for $26 a piece. They'd be even cheaper in bulk. That's $4.33 a tb, or about $520 total. You'll want to add a handful of drives for redundancy (we are talking used drives here) but either way it's entirely possible to host this entire thing including hardware for under 1500. Well within reason for someone passionate about it.

nimish• 3 years ago

A 20TB NAS HDD is $350, new. A 5-6 bay new enclosure is $100. $2400 for brand new storage + a little Raspberry Pi to serve it (another $100) is less than the price of a single new MacBook Pro.

It's easily within the means of relatively affluent professionals anywhere.

okramcivokram• 3 years ago

It's around 31TB right now, you can read more about it on https://annas-blog.org/ or get the data from https://annas-archive.org/

droopyEyelids• 3 years ago

I had heard that Anna's archive is several years out of date compared to zlibrary, do you know if thats still true? I didn't see any explanation in a quick perusal of the links you shared.

sergiomattei• 3 years ago

Library Genesis seems to continue working… thankfully!

jhbadger• 3 years ago

I wonder why they seem to have escaped? I always thought they were better known than Z-Library (which forked off from them).

Synaesthesia• 3 years ago

I think Z-library attracted more.users because of its UI. I also like Libgen

akiselev• 3 years ago

IANAL but Z-Lib is run as a for-profit business which makes it more of an open and shut case, especially if they're hosting their own files (which I believe they were, to implement that pay gate).

LibGen acts more like an archive that's hosted on IPFS which eliminates a lot of the liability and can't realistically be taken down. You can only download the books from the mirrors LibGen links to and they're often just IP addresses so there's no DNS zone to seize.

knutzui• 3 years ago

I believe a significant difference between the two is that Z-Library actively asks for donations in return for more features, whereas Library Genesis does no such thing AFAICT.

rabite2• 3 years ago

They are definitely not better known among normal people -- Z-Library was trending on TikTok massively (this is what prompted the aggressive arrests and seizures lol)

It is possible that Libgen's proprietors are known to law enforcement but never stepped within reach of Western legal authorities. Certainly, had Z-Library's staff all stayed within Russia, they never would have been arrested.

gibspaulding2• 3 years ago

I genuinely don't know what I'll do if/when library Genesis goes down. The only thing worse would be losing Wikipedia.

Has anyone attempted to put together something like torrents of the top 100Gb/1TB/10Tb etc of LibGen data? My dream would be to mirror the whole thing, but that's well beyond my budget/administrative abilities.

lkbm• 3 years ago

I don't know about sorting by popularity, but there is an effort to archive it all spread across a bunch of torrents:

http://freeread.org/torrents/

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...

lom• 3 years ago

Doing my part of the streissand effect: https://annas-archive.org/

gibspaulding2• 3 years ago

Thank you for this, I was not aware of this site. Bookmarked!

14• 3 years ago

I wonder if future generations will see this akin to the dark ages where the churches tried to control what people could access for information and burned books or punished those who published information they did not like.

znpy2• 3 years ago

Sometimes it feels it’s already becoming like that.

There always is a mob of some kind trying to censor something.

I won’t make examples for obvious reasons.

ryan93• 3 years ago

Sad. I pirate 100% of my books. After i read them i purchase the physical copy. I buy more books when i can try them first! Its also enjoyable to have it open on your computer for when you have a moment.

prenoob• 3 years ago

Just dropping my 2ç here. A lot of the debate i read on this article verges on the subject of piracy as in copyrights infringement. Let's not forget that these sites also carry an enormous amount of old, uncopyrighted, obscure, impossible to find texts that would otherwise be lost forever and that is a service that they pay for and ultimately benefits all of humanity.

is_true2• 3 years ago

Books that don't make sense financially for bookstores

garganzol• 3 years ago

To add insult to the injury, SS-Library would be another fitting name to avoid domain seizures. May be unrelated though, but they should think about rebranding as some letter combinations unfortunately became poisonous and probably became contributing factors for warrants.

unixhero• 3 years ago

Qith zlibrary were flying to close to the sun. There are better ways to evaluate books for free

sneak4• 3 years ago

https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

Something that made me a bit sad about LLMs like ChatGPT, is that they're primarily trained on free/open data sets such as Reddit, Wikipedia, and ArXiV.

Instead, we could be training LLMs on published scientific papers, textbooks, and high-quality reference materials, but we can't, because not only are they behind paywalls, they're behind thousands of individual paywalls.

TrapLord_Rhodo2• 3 years ago

OpenAI spent millions of dollars on building the data fed into the models.

No one has any idea what it's trained on. Also, with the advent of AutoGPT/llamaIndex, you can train it yourself on a massive stockpile of pirated data if you wanted.

sneak4• 3 years ago

If free lending libraries and search engines didn't exist as traditions already, the copyright cops would never let them be invented from scratch today.

hdhdnbd• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure that they would sell more books without the DRM. The books are already pirated anyway, what does the DRM do?

Do the publishers not believe this? Or are they so old school they can't accept it?

U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures

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