Every once in a while one of these books ends up being awesome and truly useful for the class, and then I order it physically because I actually want it in my bookshelf (admittedly I'm not battling poverty).
Such shadow libraries have driven me to buy the books I liked, while rarely opening and reading the ones I didn't need, and also not buying them. It's just like having a "demo" version of a book but without the anxiety of running out of pages.
I think it's already hard enough to engage young people in reading and being into books but without websites like this I think it would be nearly impossible.
For paper management Zotero + https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub plugin makes browsing google scholar very efficient.
Also Calibre fulltext search with OCR-ed PDFs:
https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF
makes learning a concept/finding test exercises even easier.
Soon a local LLM to "RAG retrieval on my library" might be the next step.
I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.
Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.
An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.
The idea that _all_ pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking.
But the idea that without piracy sales would be greater, sometimes substantially, because some pirated copies do represent "lost sales" is much more realistic though.
The idea that piracy helps audiences find and then buy the stuff they like, is also, for the most part, wishful thinking. Even for stuff one likes, once they have it in pirated form, they have little to no incentive to buy it (except a small niche wanting to "own the physical product" like a collector, which can sometimes be the case for music and games, but not software in general).
280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments
The director was quite bitter. The fight against piracy has therefore rendered auteur movies invisible and has only benefited Hollywood.
Has anyone believed otherwise?
But I agree it’s tragic. One of the film sharing boards I was a part of for 20+ years just vanished overnight. The amount of niche stuff that was available there was/is unmatched (for the topic this board was about).
The crackdown seems almost finished now- I reckon in 5-10 years piracy will be a thing of the past- and reborn in other forms after.
Study link https://felixreda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/displacement...
Intentionally hiding stuff the taxpayers paid for should be illegal and sanctioned with jail time. I'm tired by the lack of accountability our elected leaders have.
"Oh shucks, seems like I accidentally and irrecoverably deleted all these emails between me and a CEO about a multi billion taxpayer funded contract; I'm such a klutz, hihi."
You are thinking logically. Humans are NOT logical.
In some other countries, Politicians hold huge banquets right before election day. Lots of people eat at these banquets. They could go vote for someone else after eating the free food because it is a secret ballot. However, overwhelmingly those who got to eat the free food will vote for the people who reliably show up to feed them every election. Why? Because humans are not logical.
Same applies here. You'd think people have already gotten free books or music or whatever. But if they like something, they want to be a part of it. Even if they don't personally pay for it, If they really like it, they will share it with others. Who in turn will likely pay for it.
Also I remember something profound I read when I was younger. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. The fear for anything that is worthy of copyright isn't piracy, it is being irrelevant and forgotten, out of the zeitgeist. If piracy can keep something relevant, it is worth the cost.
This is to say, the evidence in this natural experiment points towards piracy reducing sales by a lot.
I think it is more often something people have to pretend to believe in order to maximise damages in breach of copyright cases.
Of course, this only works if you secure your server side properly. I remember using cracked versions of Wolfram Alpha for Android back in high school and those worked like a charm. I don’t think they lose a lot of revenue though.
Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.
These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.
Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job.
I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.
Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts.
Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.
Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself, and it also keeps answers from circulating amongst students, and saves time for the professor who won't have to do the above every single week, they can just pick however many problems they like out of the book for the relevant section.
Who gives a damn about publishers?
They introduce artificial distribution costs; They are not capable of or refuse to fact-check; the copy-editing they provide is well within the capabilities of ai; at best they introduce asset-providers (eg illustrators) to writers.
> Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself
Who cares? The western academic system is already laughably bad at weeding out the incapable. Just let people cheat. It's not like people aren't cheating already.
They changed the problem sets once a year. So at minimum you were basically obligated to buy the book twice, if not 3 times.
His series "Raw Nerve" is very good:
I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?
I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.
If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.)
I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.)
And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)
It's a disgrace that universities are willing to use books that have been turned into consumable goods by single-use software or usurious saas rental messes.
Why did all of those projects fail?
That really can't be it because the question isn't about whether it is moral, legal or good for publishers.
I really think this is just elitism and gatekeeping at its worst.
I’d also be inclined to discard theoretical “in the long run it’ll be unhelpful” concerns, since that opens up an infinitely-deep can of hypothetical contrived scenarios of arbitrary complexity that can’t be disproven. I’m sure there are very real concerns, but it’s impossible to reason about which concerns specifically people would care about.
IMO that leaves the purely practical concerns:
- Students in poverty might not have reliable internet, devices or digital literacy. If zlib isn’t available to them, it isn’t helpful
- Books available might not cater to the local language/culture, or the real world curriculum needs of those students. If zlib doesn’t help them succeed, it isn’t helpful
- The interface sucks and is confusing, which makes students struggle to find what‘s useful. If zlib isn’t useable for them, it isn’t helpful
I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.
It's a good book, so I decided I should buy it. But I don't keep a physical shelf anymore. The thing is, the publisher doesn't sell the PDF!
Which makes me wonder where the pirated PDF came from. Insider leak?
This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles.
In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.
I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library.
I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"
Typical technical books are priced at upwards of $50. $100 a day is not poor by any means in 3rd world countries.
get paid for speaking engagements / guest lecturers and consultation with industry.