[HN Gopher] A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library...
___________________________________________________________________
A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the
IPFS network
Author : baptiste313
Score : 733 points
Date : 2022-12-29 19:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (zlib.zu1k.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zlib.zu1k.com)
| Piezoid wrote:
| We downloaded libgen sql and zlib sql and exported the necessary
| data from them.
|
| Where does this "zlib sql" come from? Anna's pilimi-zlib2-index?
| rand846633 wrote:
| https://libgen.is/dbdumps/
| pilimi_anna wrote:
| I believe it is indeed our index. :) Hurray for open source and
| open data!
| altilunium wrote:
| > I hope everyone have a copy of the index locally, so that
| no need to rely on any centralized service.
|
| Is this a static index? Or maybe there's further additions
| and update in the future?
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I think with this you need torrents of the index if too many
| people start downloading the indexes would put extra load on
| your servers
| Thorentis wrote:
| What exactly is Z-Library right now? The domains were seized, and
| there doesn't seem to be a way to access the library or add new
| books to it. Is it now simply a collection that exists alongside
| libgen? Is it being run elsewhere? Does the Ipfs mirror get
| updated from somewhere?
| netfortius wrote:
| There is a discord server now, where you will find all your
| answers, plus some.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Where does one find an invite to it?
| bscphil wrote:
| If that's the case, then providing the answers should be
| pretty easy. Can you tell us what they are?
| Zuiii wrote:
| I've always been able to access it via tor which is operating
| normally.
|
| Just be sure to _confirm_ a disposable email address with them
| or they 'll never let you in. Registering an account by itself
| is no longer enough when using tor and their website will block
| you and not tell you why.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| I wish IPFS actually worked as well as they describe it working.
| Spacemolte wrote:
| I miss the recommendations on the old zlib. Anyone know of any
| alternatives?
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| Access denied Error code 1020 You do not have access to
| zlib.zu1k.com.
|
| The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from
| accessing the site.
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| Not sure why they have blocked access to me, i'm trying to
| connect from an Australian residential IP, AS4764
| r9 wrote:
| Same here, Aussie Broadband too.
| mordae wrote:
| It would be even cooler if it found books of "Stanislaw Lem" with
| the correct name as well as its ASCII equivalent "Stanislaw Lem".
| mdaniel wrote:
| You may want to try building it locally without their
| AsciiFoldingFilter and see if it behaves as you wish:
| https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-searcher/blob/0.6.0/cr...
|
| I don't know tantivy well enough to know if it'd be possible to
| put the folded in one field and the literal in another and then
| use the search syntax to choose between them
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| looks great. Is there an api for something like this so i can
| make it an extension of my terminal?
| baptiste313 wrote:
| Of course there are examples on their
| [GitHub](https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-
| searcher#original-sear...)
| hosh wrote:
| You can self-host it: https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-
| searcher
| mdaniel wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea GitHub releases would tolerate such a huge
| release asset: https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-
| searcher/releases (index_0.6.zip is 1.48GB and index_0.5.zip
| is 1.75GB) It seems their API docs do talk about 502s during
| upload, but don't otherwise specify a limit: https://docs.git
| hub.com/en/rest/releases/assets?apiVersion=2...
|
| The irony of not hosting them on IPFS does not escape me :-/
| tmpburning wrote:
| Can't wait for someone to come up for a solution to copyright
| that will benefit everyone.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| So, you mean, the current copyright solution? That has seen
| creation of works skyrocket? Or do you mean a system where
| people can steal what they want because 'reasons' and 'they
| want to pay less because xyz'? Do you propose a system that
| takes ownership from authors and redistributes their works
| maybe? Why shouldn't owners get to set the pricing? Just
| because people want to steal doesn't mean it's ok to. Just
| because people don't like the price doesn't mean they should
| get to set it. The current system not working would look
| something like no works being released (because the author felt
| it wasn't worth it). The fact that people put in so much effort
| to steal these works shows the current system is in fact
| working. People wanting to steal does not equal not working.
| Authors can set their prices to free, but funny, they choose
| not to (as is their right).
| tmpburning wrote:
| imagine if you built a building and then someone purchased
| it... and everyone that visited it also had to also pay
| you.... thats a bit like how copyright is today...
|
| But what is even worst is that they are trying to make you
| pay them forever (subscriptions).
| Tams80 wrote:
| Then how do you propose that creatives make a living? Come
| on, no dawdling!
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| 'Creatives' who hold back free flow of knowledge can get
| a real job :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018>
| realusername wrote:
| For production the current copyright system kind of works
| (except the whole debate on remixes) I'll give you that but
| for keeping older content...
|
| Try to find some lesser known book or newspaper from the 80s
| in epub legally or non-top films from the 90s and you'll see
| what I'm saying.
|
| Everything is trashed just after it's being produced. The
| uncomfortable truth for those large copyright conglomerates
| is that right now it's the piracy scene which keeps most of
| the content alive, to the point they even have to pirate
| their own content to release it again sometimes.
|
| And then there's the whole debate on the length of copyright
| itself, there's no conceivable damage in any shape or form of
| pirating the Beatles.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| How about a system that - when the author / rights holder
| "abandons" a work by no longer actively publishing it, it
| automatically falls into public domain after 5 years? 70+
| years after the author's death is literally a lifetime of
| people who may be unable to access copyrighted but abandoned
| work. This benefits no one.
|
| Too many works are currently unavailable
| commercially/legally.
| yucky wrote:
| > Or do you mean a system where people can steal what they
| want because 'reasons' and 'they want to pay less because
| xyz'?
|
| If you have a copy of something, and I make a copy of it, and
| you still have your copy of it, what was stolen? If I find a
| book in the library and take pictures of each page, is that
| also theft? What if I write all the words down? What if I use
| a hand scanner and OCR to copy and transcribe it, is that
| theft?
| spigottoday wrote:
| Not an author, are you. Not a lawyer either. When you have
| spent years honing your craft and spent many months
| creating a work so that you can buy what you need to live
| and can't afford to support your self and your family
| without that income and then YOU give that work away - then
| I may find some value in your self serving questions. By
| the way, the answer to your questions is yes.
| yucky wrote:
| > By the way, the answer to your questions is yes.
|
| You say it's theft to take pictures of the pages of a
| library book? I would need you to cite your sources
| please.
|
| If it matters, I recently ordered 6 hardcovers from an
| author who's book that I downloaded from libgen was so
| impressively written, well sourced and thought provoking
| that I just had to put his best works (the book I "stole"
| by downloading, and 5 of his other works) in my physical
| library.
|
| On the flipside, I recently wanted to read a book
| (different author) so badly but it wasn't available
| _anywhere_ for less than $100 since it 's out of print,
| so I downloaded it and don't feel bad at all. I haven't
| read that one yet, and if I love it I might spend the
| money for a physical copy, but it wouldn't matter since
| it's out of print and used and wouldn't make a difference
| to the author (also, he's dead).
| jll29 wrote:
| Germany has a system where the books purchased by
| libraries and also printers and scanners contain a fee
| that contributes to a fund for reimbursing copyright
| holders (Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort, cf.
| https://www.vgwort.de/startseite.html ). Very fast
| copiers/scanners are more expensive - inter alia - for
| that reason, according to a colleague of mine (I'm not an
| expert in this).
|
| So you copying one page from a book in a library would
| still lead to some form of compensation, although one
| could debate whether it is fair or not, whereas using a
| P2P search engine to locate an online copy of a PDF would
| not.
|
| Also, IMHO, the discussion of such online libraries
| should separate the topic of fair compensation of authors
| (I believe Norway or Finnland have "author stipends" paid
| by the government that one can apply) and the topic of
| locating and researching whether a book is what one needs
| or to one's liking.
| yucky wrote:
| I would imagine authors get compensation from their books
| purchased by US libraries too. But it's not going to
| scale with how many times a book is checked out, or even
| prevent it from being copied after checkout.
| tadfisher wrote:
| The obvious response is that you stole the author's income,
| by obtaining a copy of their work without compensating them
| for it.
|
| So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered to
| purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity to
| read it, thus the author did not lose their sale.
|
| The conversation will then turn to defending the existence
| of copyright as an incentivization to produce valuable
| works worth reading, and then to how the publishing
| industry eats those incentives anyway.
|
| In the end, no one will exit the conversation having gained
| any insight.
| yucky wrote:
| > So the obvious retort is that you may not have bothered
| to purchase the author's work, forgoing your opportunity
| to read it, thus the author did not lose their sale.
|
| I can't speak for all pirates, but I will pirate things I
| want to sample and then often buy it if it's what I was
| looking for. At least with books. I haven't bought music
| in 20 years.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > The obvious response is that you stole the author's
| income, by obtaining a copy of their work without
| compensating them for it.
|
| Given that I (as an European) pay extra fees for
| copyright management companies for each photography-
| enabled device, each memory device, each scanner and each
| printer, I should be enabled to make as many copies of
| any copyright-protected work as I want.
|
| Which is incidentally how it works over here. What gets
| you in trouble is making works accessible to copiers, not
| owning copies.
| lxgr wrote:
| These fees are an even worse solution than the current
| maze of DRMs and walled gardens.
|
| Maybe they were an acceptable compromise in a time before
| e-books and e-readers, but they are neither fair to
| users, nor do they seem high enough to fairly compensate
| content creators without their normal revenue channels.
|
| If the intention behind it is a kind of public subsidy
| for content creation: Sure, there are much worse things
| to spend tax money on.
|
| But please do it properly then, i.e. something like a
| "public Spotify/Netflix" for books and films that
| correctly attributes view counts, rather than just
| handing money almost exclusively to already
| popular/financially stable creators as measured by past
| sales records.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| My buddy has nudes of his wife on his phone. I want them so I
| bypass his 'drm' that prevents me from taking what I want and
| make copies. He still has his copy so no one's hurt. Information
| wants to be free. I take what I want.
| brunoqc wrote:
| Is that web site accessible with ipfs?
| mr-pink wrote:
| ffs is there any way people can just not talk about z-library for
| a year..what is wrong with you all? this is a public forum. you
| should not share any copyrighted material without the rights to
| do so
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I hope every project you work on has it's source code stolen
| resulting in failure. And this is coming from a pretty crappy
| person, but this website sure does love stealing from authors (so
| that it can enjoy the fruits of their labor).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A wealth-indexed fee averaging about $5/mo per household in the
| US and collected through broadband providers could provide
| access to every work ever published, pay authors, _and_
| eliminate both the need and practice of piracy.
|
| The publishing industry prefers, however, to hoard its Smaug-
| gold, make criminals of the curious, deny access both to the
| vast majority of the population and _to_ the vast majority of
| works, all to line its own pockets at an immense cost to the
| rest of us, authors, artists, musicians, and other creators
| included.
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018>
|
| Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge is a
| public good"
|
| <https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/30..
| .>
|
| Copyright is brain damage:
|
| <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc>
| troad wrote:
| I am opposed to copyright in its current form, but this is a
| very naive suggestion. How exactly do you distribute the fee
| among authors? Who collects it? How does dispute resolution
| work, if I don't feel like I'm being compensated fairly? Can
| I opt out if I don't read books? What if everyone opts out
| and just continues pirating?
|
| Let's say I just published one hundred books of semi-AI
| generated bad fiction. When can I expect my cheques?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Have a look at Europe, where we have such money-
| redistribution organisations.
| troad wrote:
| Yes, legislatively-sanctioned rent seeking is common in
| Europe. In what way has the existence of such a scheme
| ameliorated the excesses of copyright law in Europe?
| Copyright terms are the same in Europe as in the United
| States (life + 70), but Europe tends to have weaker fair
| use provisions than the US (e.g. 'fair dealing' in the UK
| and Ireland). In what way have these schemes ended
| piracy, as the original commenter suggests they would?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Q: How exactly do you distribute the fee among authors?_
|
| The model of mechanical royalties already exists in the
| music industry. That provides a useful model for other
| copyrighted works. Effectively this creates a regulated,
| universal, legally-defined market. I can see some
| variations in rates based on content types, discussed in
| previous HN discussions.
|
| See:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment#Mechanical_r
| oy...>
|
| <https://www.royaltyexchange.com/blog/mechanical-royalties>
|
| <https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/Understanding_Mechanical_Ro
| ya...>
|
| Please note that this is discussed at length in the
| previously-linked thread here:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018>
|
| _Q: Who collects [payments]?_
|
| A "~$5/mo per household in the US and collected through
| broadband providers", as stated in my parent comment.
|
| _Q: How does dispute resolution work?_
|
| _Ownership_ disputes are adjudicated as they are today.
|
| _Auditing_ disputes are adjudicated as they are today,
| modulo restrictions against binding arbitration and other
| conditions as discussed by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin
| in _Chokepoint Capitalism_ :
| <https://bookshop.org/p/books/chokepoint-capitalism-how-
| big-t...>
|
| _Payment rate_ disputes are addressed through a regulator,
| genre / content-tier basis, and the legislative /
| political process reflecting interests of the public,
| creators, publishers, and other stakeholders.
|
| _Q: Can I opt out if I don 't read books?_
|
| No.
|
| On the basis that _the common wealth created by others
| having access to information_ is a public good _and_
| benefit, much as police, fire, health, sewerage, and
| defence services are. Note that the cost is _indexed to
| wealth /income_, such that those of limited means pay
| little or nothing. Keep in mind that you are _already
| paying_ roughly $800 /year _per head_ for content access
| through advertising. This isn 't an additional fee, it's a
| restructuring of an existing financing model with many
| perverse outcomes in terms of manipulation, the type(s) of
| content incentivised, a pervasive surveillance model, and
| frauds against both advertising targets _and_ advertisers.
|
| _Q: What if everyone opts out?_
|
| See above.
|
| _Q: What about AI-generated crud?_
|
| This is where I see a graduated compensation model with a
| number of tiers. AI-based glurge would see rates based on
| the costs of production, as would investigative journalism.
| The former would result in very low compensation rates, the
| latter should see higher. Quality-determination by various
| means might well be an element. Whilst _individual_
| negotiation by bidders isn 't something I see as part of
| the model, _a collective bidding_ based on sectors, guilds,
| and /or major aggregated publishers could be.
|
| Discussed earlier:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033>
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674> <https://ol
| d.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...>
|
| This HN comment search on "content syndication
| by:dredmorbius" should address numerous other concerns: <ht
| tps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.
| ..>
| Tams80 wrote:
| I won't say if I have or haven't downloaded ebooks without
| paying.
|
| But I will say that I have bought both ebooks and physical
| books from authors that I like and appreciate the work and
| effort they have put into their craft. I've spent rather a lot
| on it, actually.
| xtian wrote:
| No one is entitled to a particular form of revenue. We live in
| an attention-based economy. Talented and savvy authors can find
| any number of ways to derive revenue from the attention their
| work attracts apart from charging IP tolls.
|
| If not, they can always get a job where they have no ownership
| stake in the fruits of their labor, like almost every other job
| and 99.9% of people writing code for money.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Whilst I've some sympathies with this argument, it dismisses
| the larger question of _how to provide societal benefits of
| information and entertainment creation_.
|
| It's quite possible that the size of such sectors today is
| excessive, though there's a strong argument that
| _information_ is under-incentivised whilst _entertainment_ is
| excessively incentivised, to say nothing of various forms of
| manipulation and propaganda, or the negative impacts of
| surveillance and fraud that are intrinsic to the adtech
| field.
|
| So the question of incentives, compensation, financing, and
| revenue collection do deserve addressing.
|
| I do agree that the present model is addressing _those
| specific elements_ quite poorly.
| misnome wrote:
| This exact argument can be used to justify both POV.
|
| No one is entitled to have any particular piece of media
| available to them for free, either?
|
| Talented and savvy consumers can find any number of ways to
| make money to pay for media, like 99.9% of other consumers.
| xtian wrote:
| Except that making a living as an author or via another
| creative pursuit is a luxury and privilege premised upon
| the hard labor performed by countless others which actually
| reproduces our society.
|
| It's also not really a matter of entitlement. It's just an
| objective fact that trying to gatekeep knowledge behind IP
| toll bridges is a losing battle which only serves to hinder
| the development of many realms of human endeavor.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| You want to kill the goose so you can consume the eggs.
| You want to steal their products but condemn the
| creators. You must not know creative types and how much
| most of them sacrifice to try and create from the passion
| inside them.
| xtian wrote:
| Actually I do. Their passion doesn't entitle them to
| anything, and their sacrifices pale in comparison to
| those made by people who do hard labor for a living.
|
| IP laws don't protect small creators anyway, most of whom
| will fail regardless. They protect the big conglomerates
| from multitudes of potential creators who might otherwise
| find education and success outside of the established
| institutions.
| skyechurch wrote:
| Strong agree, I still haven't forgiven myself for that time
| ABBA starved to death after I taped "Dancing Queen" off the
| radio.
|
| I use OverDrive/LibGen etc because it's generally more
| convenient than the public library. If I like a book enough to
| actually finish it, I buy a paper copy because ebooks are
| inherently inferior and probably always will be. If I was still
| a student I would use OverDrive/LibGen etc specifically to
| steal from textbook publishers who charge $100 for an 18th
| edition riddled with factual and grammatical errors in hope
| that they would go bankrupt, but it wouldn't work. We have a
| long way yet to go.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| Copyright enjoys stealing culture from everyone
| cratermoon wrote:
| A question about z-lib, libgen, and regular libraries
|
| Suppose I check an e-book out of my local library. Because
| Reasons, the library doesn't "own" unlimited "copies" of the
| book, so each "copy" can only be checked out to one patron at a
| time and if there are enough holds then a patron can't renew a
| checked out book. In short, ebooks in libraries are just like
| regular paper books, except to you don't have leave your house.
|
| I had this ebook on hold for three months because it's very
| popular, but finally have it on my device, but I only have 3
| weeks before I can no longer read it because of holds. I get
| about 2/3rds the way through before lock closes on the bits on my
| device. It's a very popular book, it will be 3 months before I
| can read it again.
|
| I go online, use some service, find the exact same book, down to
| all but the locking bits, and download it, finish reading it a
| few days later, and then forget about it. I might delete it later
| if I need room.
|
| Is that a crime? Have either the author or publisher lost money?
| On the one hand, I can say yes because if the libraries purchased
| more "copies", the waiting list wouldn't be so long, I might have
| been able to renew it and finish it. On the other hand, I wasn't
| going to buy the book myself, and the library has to balance
| budget and demand, so they probably wouldn't purchase additional
| "copies".
|
| What ethical questions do authors and readers see here?
| kleinishere wrote:
| Not an answer to your question, but interesting context for how
| eBooks work with libraries. And how not checking out a second
| time effectively is a loss of one "use" that may have directed
| the library to spend more on this book, rather than another.
| Sounds like you're aware. Loved this Planet Money podcast
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...
| lxgr wrote:
| That link isn't working for me. Are you referring to this
| episode?
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-
| publishe...
| Tams80 wrote:
| That's really down to your personal ethics and how much you are
| willing to tolerate.
|
| As you're not distributing it, the chance of someone coming
| after you for downloading a non-legal copy is almost non-
| existent, and pretty much 0 if you've taken some basic
| precautions.
|
| It sounds like you've answered your own question there; that as
| you'd read the majority of the book, that there's no real loss
| to you finishing it for free.
| juuular wrote:
| You might find this interesting:
|
| Reverse engineering yet another ebook format (Nemanja
| Mijailovic) https://mijailovic.net/2022/12/25/hkpropel/
| mdaniel wrote:
| With discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125958
| cratermoon wrote:
| I did read that. The format he had wasn't really locked down,
| it was just a regular epub behind a crappy web-based viewer.
| The library epub downloads really do have DRM locks.
| wccrawford wrote:
| My layman's understanding of copyright law says you didn't
| commit a crime, but whoever sent you the book _did_ commit a
| crime. My understanding is that it 's not illegal to download a
| book, it's illegal to distribute a book. (Or other copyrighted
| work.)
| 1123581321 wrote:
| No, it is illegal to download (make a copy of) the book. To
| be legal, you would have to merely view the book without
| making a copy. This is the operating principle behind all
| those video streaming sites. This isn't a comment on what OP
| should have done.
| justinclift wrote:
| Doesn't this vary according to the location of the
| participants?
|
| eg in some countries participation in some parts of it
| (uploading/downloading/etc) is legal, whereas in other
| countries it can be the other way around.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes. I assumed I was replying to Americans and shouldn't
| have.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I stand corrected. Thanks!
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Wouldn't the transmission over the network of the bits of
| the video count as an act of copying?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Legally, no. That question has come up regarding things
| like browser caching as well. But the precedent is that
| it is not illegal to merely view copyrighted material you
| haven't licensed or bought, even if you happened to seek
| out that viewing.
| DanBC wrote:
| > Is that a crime?
|
| You didn't say where you are. Copyright infringement tends not
| to be a criminal offence, unless you're doing it as part of a
| business (so if you print out copies of that ebook and sell
| them) or you do so much of it you distort the market (you
| distribute so many copies of that ebook you destroy the profits
| that publisher might have made).
|
| The rights holder can sue for their losses, but this tends to
| be the cost of the item, so they tend not to do that.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > Is that a crime?
|
| In many countries it is at least a copyright violation,
| although it should be noted that _downloading_ (not sharing
| while torrenting) is legal in some places.
|
| > Have either the author or publisher lost money?
|
| On average, probably yes, because _some_ people would buy the
| book, some libraries would get more budget or allocate more of
| the budget to that book, and most importantly, if you did re-
| borrow it in 3 months it 'd further expand the waitlist,
| perhaps making someone go "screw that, I'm not waiting 4
| months" and buy it.
|
| OTOH, if you took all the money being spent on entertainment
| (books movies etc.), collected that as a tax, distributed it to
| the entertainment industry based on what people actually
| consume, _and in exchange made everything available to
| everyone_ , there would be no loss of revenue and everyone
| would benefit from much higher, friction-free levels of access.
|
| That's part of what made Netflix work. It extracted ~$120/year
| of revenue and gave access to everything. Now, with all the
| competing services, they probably still don't extract more than
| one service's yearly fee over the same population (because few
| people have more than 1-2 services, and the ones that just gave
| up and went back to piracy probably make up for the ones that
| now pay for 2 instead of 1 service) but people now have much
| less access.
|
| Without a massive "media tax" which would have practical issues
| that don't make it feasible or desirable, some friction on free
| access is necessary or nobody would pay for content, and at the
| same time that friction harms society by limiting access.
| Piracy puts an upper bound on how much friction can be added
| before people go the yarrr way.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Of the past twenty ebooks I've downloaded, 18 have dead authors
| and only one is alive.
|
| Unless you focus on the very latest releases, most authors are
| already dead. If you round up just about any list of great
| works from the 20th century, you'll find that most of those
| authors are dead and have been for years. If you like 19th
| century books, _all_ of those authors are dead.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I think the central ethical question to piracy is that
| ultimately, buying a book someone wrote is fair to the author.
| The author is part of a society -- our planet, did something to
| contribute to society, and it's fair that we reward that person
| if we also benefit from their work. Therefore, whenever you
| benefit from someone else's work, how do we reward them.
|
| Now, I think this question is nuanced. For example, let's take
| Harry Potter. That book has sold millions. In my mind, J.K.
| Rowling has already been rewarded by humanity for her work many
| times over, so if you were to pirate her book then I think that
| is a far lesser evil than pirating a book written by an author
| who has barely made any sales.
|
| Basically, I view the question of piracy as follows: (a) have
| we rewarded the author enough for that specific work? and (b)
| if not, then it's not right to pirate their book, and I should
| buy it. I think everyone should ask themselves that question.
|
| The same with movies. Marvel movies are a money-making machine
| and they have more than enough money to keep them going. An
| indie film much less so.
|
| The question of whether an author has been rewarded enough is
| tricky. For example, if Elon Musk wrote a book, I would have no
| problem pirating it in a microsecond because society rewarded
| him enough. But maybe that's not so clear-cut because the
| editor might be poor. Thus, I think it's safer to go on the
| basis of sales rather than the wealth of the author, except of
| course if the author is self-published. In that case, if they
| are rich, then who cares. Of course, what is rich? Well it's
| hard to give exact numbers but if they have 10 million dollars
| that's definitely rich enough.
| staunch wrote:
| I'm looking forward to some new AI system making it possible to
| generate high quality audiobooks from epub files.
|
| This "AI book reader" doesn't exist yet, right?
| mdaniel wrote:
| The Google Books mobile app will read any(?) book in your
| library, and at least they used to support uploading your own
| books, although I haven't tried it in a while:
| https://play.google.com/books/uploads?type=ebooks and in the
| individual book, tap on it, tap the bamboo menu, choose "Read
| aloud"
| ljf wrote:
| Thanks - that is really goodand didn't realise that was
| something I already had installed.
|
| I'd be happy to pay for a service where I can adjust the
| readers voice and speed, but this worked amazingly well, and
| the enhanced version of the audio is really good.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Working on this now, cherry-picked audio from such AI systems
| abound, but submitting arbitrary text for audio synthesis
| requires a much higher quality bar to be listenable. Planning
| to have something out early 2023.
| o_____________o wrote:
| What's the best off the shelf solution you've found? I've
| been trying a few different apps to read my queued articles
| to me, but all of the voices are awful.
| leobg wrote:
| iOS: Voice Dream Reader. Use Ivona "Amy" or "Joey". Also
| allows annotations such as comments and highlights and
| exporting your annotations.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| I wrote my own script to send article text through GCP text
| to speech, which I then put on a private podcast feed. If
| you go through the voices there's some decent ones. I also
| found that speeding up audio in podcast app greatly
| improves listen ability. I also find picking an AI voice
| with an accent (for me British or aussi or Indian) helps
| trick my brain into tolerance.
|
| However I also got tired of manually extracting text and
| running my script so now I mostly use:
| https://www.listenlater.fm though on this I just use the
| "Matthew". For 5-10 min articles it doesn't really matter,
| you get used to the voices so long as you can do something
| else in the meantime lol.
| leobg wrote:
| And best open source TTS engine I found so far is Coqui
| TTS. Demos here:
|
| https://mbarnig.github.io/TTS-Models-Comparison/
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I've tried Coqui for generating ebooks and found the
| edge-cases to be too severe for this to be usable; Coqui
| has a nasty habit of having strokes, for instance "hello"
| may become _" hellooooooOOoooooooooooOOOOoOOOOOoOOOOOoooo
| ooOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooOOOOOOOooo...."_ With some
| manipulation of the input (like adding punctuation) you
| can get around this, but if you're trying to automate
| this for a whole book then I think you'll need a lot of
| trial and error before you get the input massaging
| heuristics right.
|
| The best TTS system for generating ebooks (that I have
| used so far) is MacOS's TTS. The process is fairly
| straight forward; first break the book into sentences
| using the standard heuristics. Run each of those
| sentences through TTS to generate an audio file for that
| sentence, then create a subtitle file with the text of
| the sentence. Then stitch them all together with ffmpeg,
| optionally adding a dummy video track if your media
| player of choice needs one to display subtitles (mpv does
| not, but some do.) Now you have a subtitled "audiobook."
|
| MacOS's TTS has a robotic quality to it, but it generally
| works and you can become accustomed to it fairly easily
| if you give it a chance.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| "You do not have access to zlib.zu1k.com. The site owner may have
| set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site."
|
| What did I do?
| baptiste313 wrote:
| Nothing wrong only the site owner block it temporarily surely
| with the large number of requests since sharing otherwise I
| shared in a previous comment another site to access the tool:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184167
| danbuildrthe333 wrote:
| Did a test, this is cool!
| iyedgivehead wrote:
| The site is down
| nyolfen wrote:
| this is the result of the annas-archive people mirroring the
| contents of their crawling project onto ipfs -- huge props
| FounderBurr wrote:
| [flagged]
| jarboot wrote:
| Loving the simplicity of a typescript frontend + rust backend
| Nican wrote:
| I like reading about IPFS, but I do not really have the time to
| learn about it and get involved.
|
| Last I remember, Z-Library was having an issue scaling the DHS to
| handle the number of files [1]. Did those issues get resolved?
| How is it going now? Also, is there anything being done to ensure
| every file has seeders?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33716560
| survirtual wrote:
| I've dived deep into IPFS and built several prototypes on top
| of it. It ended up not being performant enough for me, and that
| was after heavily modifying the codebase so that it was true
| p2p browser & server (their webrtc transport had a lot of
| issues and they didn't seem too interested in it, but my needs
| required it as a backbone).
|
| The security was also a concern, and the scaling had issues.
| Pinning millions of small items got so slow it would not
| function. Then I ended up having concerns over hashed based
| addressing being easy to censor with the architecture IPFS was
| using (more hub & spoke than anything, given signaling and
| relay servers were centralized).
|
| I could go on but I ran into so many issues I ended up
| implementing my own solution that did everything I wanted.
| Wanted to squeeze even more performance, I've been converting
| that solution to Rust.
|
| This was a couple years ago so maybe things have changed since
| I used it. Last I checked, they seemed busy on Filecoin.
|
| The idea of IPFS is great and I want to see it succeed, but I
| think that they got so caught up in their jargon and
| modularity, the project lost track of some fundamentals.
| oldgregg wrote:
| Honestly I think Consensys/IPFS/Libp2p is just some
| corporatized way to derail real P2P and decentralization.
| Their libraries are total garbage. Lots of complicated code
| that simply doesn't work. No documentation. I mean look how
| much IPFS and Libp2p is pumped but IT DOESN'T WORK. IPNS is a
| joke. All way overengineered crap that does everything but
| actually nothing. Look at the $$$ and pedigree behind
| Consensys it's 100% establishment.
| mhluongo wrote:
| You're confusing ConsenSys and Protocol Labs.
|
| ConsenSys was founded by Joe Lubin, and is the corporate
| entity behind MetaMask, Infura, etc. It counts MasterCard
| and JP Morgan as investors.
|
| Protocol Labs was founded by Juan Benet and is the primary
| sponsor of IPFS and the dev team behind Filecoin. They're
| funded primarily from the private token sales of FIL.
|
| Agree with the sibling comment that the focus on modularity
| and solving "all of the things" rather than focusing on
| adoption seems to be a pattern with Protocol Labs, though
| I'm a big fan of what they're trying to build.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| ConsenSys is to IPFS as Blockstream is to BTC
| mhluongo wrote:
| No, Protocol Labs it to IPFS as Blockstream is to BTC.
|
| ConsenSys is an entirely different company focused on
| Ethereum, and neither invented nor maintain IPFS. That's
| Protocol Labs.
|
| Protocol Labs didn't start out of ConsenSys either -- in
| fact, I don't believe they have too much beneficial
| ownership in common at all. In addition to the separate
| founding stories already mentioned, you can read about
| how Protocol Labs was initially funded by Union Square.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| ConsenSys is to Blockstream as MetaMask, Infura,
| MasterCard and JP Morgan are to AXA
|
| Protocol Labs, as you correctly identified, is not a
| stooge of global corporate interests.
| survirtual wrote:
| Anything is possible, but having some limited github
| interactions with the core team, that seems unlikely. My
| impression is that they are a passionate group that hit the
| jackpot a bit prematurely.
|
| Their intentions seemed good to me they just have an
| ungodly amount of financing while perhaps lacking a core
| vision & understanding of what is at stake.
|
| Put another way, seems more like an academic building
| something rather than a seasoned industry pro.
|
| In any case, I don't want to disparage their project. I
| learned a lot from their code & concepts. We are all on our
| own roads towards brilliance, contributing to each other in
| all kinds of ways.
| oldgregg wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't disparage the talent- no doubt vast
| majority have good intentions but unfortunately they are
| being paid handsomely to have their work be rendered
| ineffective. Gobble up all the best P2P devs and get them
| focused on work that is largely ineffective. Lots of code
| and specs but nothing really usable. Code is not very
| original, they just take other libraries and tweak them.
| mplex is their version of yamux, autonat is their version
| of stun/ice... but then none of their libraries really
| work together seemlessly. Embrace extend extinguish? If
| you look at their massive code output then google "what
| apps use libp2p" you won't find anything because nobody
| uses it. Berty is really only app worth a mention.
| survirtual wrote:
| I'm not saying conspiracy doesn't exist -- it most
| certainly does -- but it just seems unlikely in most
| cases.
|
| In this case, to be blunt, give a bunch of nerds millions
| / billions of dollars and see how fast their objectives
| change. Going from being students to having material
| wealth unimaginable to most suddenly gets you invited to
| a lot of conferences / parties / inner circles. You're
| doing a lot less engineering and a lot more socializing &
| experiencing, and suddenly those lofty ideals & nerdy
| curiosities may just not matter as much any more driving
| around in a lambo with what you'd consider super models.
| But making even MORE money to do cool things just might.
|
| Very few people exist on this planet that can resist
| that, and it is the explanation for most people /
| projects / orgs that make it big losing their way. Once
| you have a lot of money, suddenly life without it seems
| impossible, and you start to compromise values to secure
| more of it. It is a steep downhill journey.
|
| Most projects are unoriginal. Just a derivation slightly
| improved on, or a recombination of prior works in a
| compelling new way. Nothing wrong with that; our universe
| is composed of relatively few atoms combined in all kinds
| of special ways.
| dfghjkjhgfdx wrote:
| you two are discussing semantics :)
|
| you both are correct on all assumptions. and are now
| discussing how corruption with money within the existing
| system is both undetectable/deniable and effective.
|
| ipfs is now, for all purposes, a honeypot against dweb.
| or at least a way for opposition (dweb proponents) to
| waste valuable time. as your experiences proved.
| 2color wrote:
| I think that this is a misunderstanding but I understand
| where this is coming from.
|
| Let me share my 2 cents as the Developer Advocate for
| IPFS (employed by PL).
|
| You claim that our work is largely ineffective but what
| are you referring to? The IPFS ecosystem is like a
| cluster of several ecosystems, e.g. Libp2p, IPLD, IPFS,
| Multiformats.
|
| > Lots of code and specs but nothing really usable
|
| Some of the libraries may not be as actively maintained
| as others -- this is the nature of open source. But to
| claim nothing is usable is not accurate -- there's a lot
| of stuff that works pretty reliably.
|
| > Code is not very original
|
| Who cares....
|
| > autonat is their version of stun/ice.
|
| It's actually Autonat, DCUtR, and Circuit Relay V2 which
| are pretty amazing given that it's like STUN/ICE but
| decentralized! Anyone in the network might help you hole
| punch through NAT and from network measurements the
| success rates average around 70%
| (https://youtu.be/bzL7Y1wYth8?t=1091). Saying it's just
| "their version of STUN/ICE) takes away from the main
| qualitative difference of doing it without centralized
| coordination servers.
|
| > "what apps use libp2p" you won't find anything because
| nobody uses it.
|
| Ethereum uses libp2p GossipSub since the beacon chain
| launched. Berty, Satellite (https://satellite.im/),
| Status (https://discuss.status.im/t/waku-
| version-2-pitch/1776#org900...).
|
| Either way, I appreciate your comment, we need to be
| doing a better job of surfacing some of the great
| progress being made in the IPFS/Libp2p ecosystem.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Peer-to-peer is too general and too useful to be spoilt by
| "blockchain". But there is so much money behind this crap
| it is a formidable virus that can infect any project.
|
| ConsenSys is a company formed by Ethereum co-founder. He
| has sold out to the big banks, in the opinion of some
| Consensys shareholders.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/consensys-shareholders-
| readyi...
|
| "Falls says he believes both MetaMask and Infura - what he
| calls "the crown jewels" of ConsenSys - could have been
| decentralized and tokenized, and that their projected use
| is "completely anathema" to the peer-to-peer principles of
| the space.
|
| Meanwhile, a number of teams are looking to bring
| "institutional DeFi" - with its known counterparties and
| compliant custody arrangements - to the marketplace.
|
| "Forget about the shareholders for a minute," Falls said.
| "Think about the consequences of the change in the
| influence over these infrastructure pieces.""
|
| Out of curiosity I was looking at the evolution of IPFS
| hashes. They have gotten more complex. IPFS now uses
| base58btc exclusively. That's "btc" as in Bitcoin.
| Something like rhash, which has traditionally supported
| hashes used in peer-to-peer protocols, has no support for
| base58btc.
|
| People are now trying to associate IPFS with "Web3". For
| example, check out this paper published a couple of weeks
| ago.
|
| "Studying the workload of a fully decentralised Web3
| system: IPFS"
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.07375v1.pdf
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Above I stated, "IPFS now uses base58btc exclusively." A
| more precise statement would have been something like,
| "IPFS CIDs originally used base58btc exclusively." It
| looks like IPFS is moving to a new CID protocol that
| allows use of non-BTC hashes. That's a step in the right
| direction, IMHO.
|
| "In CIDv0, hashes are always encoded with base58btc.
| Always."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200810110206/https://proto.
| sch...
|
| "Converting CID versions
|
| You can convert any CIDv0 to CIDv1, because the implicit
| prefixes from v0 become explicit in v1. However, because
| CIDv1 supports multiple codecs and multiple bases and
| CIDv0 does not, not all CIDv1 can be converted to CIDv0.
| In fact, only CIDv1 that have the following properties
| can be converted to CIDv0:
|
| multibase = base58btc multicodec = dag-pb multihash-
| algorithm = sha2-256 multihash-length = 32 (32 bytes,
| equivalent to 256 bits)"
|
| https://proto.school/anatomy-of-a-cid/06/
|
| Thank you @2color for the correction.
| 2color wrote:
| > IPFS now uses base58btc exclusively
|
| That's blatantly wrong. IPFS supports 25 different base
| representations (https://github.com/multiformats/multibas
| e/blob/master/multib...).
|
| In fact, recently, two community members decided to
| implement a new base encoding with emojis for fun:
|
| https://cid.ipfs.tech/#%F0%9F%9A%80%F0%9F%AA%90%E2%AD%90%
| F0%...
|
| https://github.com/multiformats/multihash supports at the
| very least SHA1 SHA2-256 SHA2-512 SHA3/Keccak
| Blake2b-256/Blake2b-512/Blake2s-128/Blake2s-256 Blake3
| and Strobe. Hashes in IPFS are being standardised through
| the IETF and W3C https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-
| multiformats-multihash-05.html.
|
| If you need rhash, you are welcome to submit a PR! We
| also have a grants program you can use to be rewarded for
| this.
| RunSet wrote:
| > IPFS now uses base58btc exclusively. That's "btc" as in
| Bitcoin.
|
| It is true that Base58 is named for its original
| implemention in bitcoin but other than the name it has
| nothing to do with bitcoin.
|
| The difference from Base64: It excludes non-alphanumeric
| characters and visually similar characters (I, l; O, 0)
| to make the output more human-friendly[0].
|
| The problem it attempts to solve: Making bitcoin
| addresses more human-readable. That is likely also why
| IPFS uses it.
|
| [0]
| https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Base58#How_it_works.3F
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| More on financial relationship between IPFS (Protocol
| Labs) and Consensys (Ethereum co-founder):
|
| https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/consensys-
| raises-65...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/blockchain-firm-
| consensys...
|
| https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/protocol-labs-
| colla...
| mhluongo wrote:
| Again, ConsenSys isn't behind IPFS. These are two
| different things.
|
| > People are now trying to associate IPFS with "Web3".
| For example, check out this paper published a couple of
| weeks ago.
|
| IPFS has been used to host dApps for a long time -- eg
| the Uniswap frontend. This isn't a recent thing.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Same experience here.
|
| The #1 lesson they failed to learn from Bittorrent and Tox:
| your DHT _must be sessionless_.
|
| QUIC is not a solution to this particular problem. Although
| QUIC uses UDP, it still creates and manages sessions. This is
| incompatible with decentralized scaling. At the scale of
| Bittorrent and DNS you cannot manage this kind of session
| state without centralization.
| 2color wrote:
| IPFS encompasses more than just a DHT: - representing
| content addressed data with hashes in CIDs - Discovering
| them (via the DHT) - Transfering (Bitswap, HTTP, Graphsync,
| sneakernet and more in development)
|
| I'm not 100% certain what you mean by the DHT being
| sessionless.
|
| > At the scale of Bittorrent and DNS you cannot manage this
| kind of session state without centralization.
|
| You don't have to route content via the public DHT.
| Depending on what kind of data you're publishing, you can
| use a private DHT swarm, or delegated routing with HTTP.
|
| > This is incompatible with decentralized scaling.
| anacrolix wrote:
| Absolutely. Too many people try to implement DHT on top of
| stateful connections, it doesn't scale. It must be as cheap
| as a single packet or two, with no context.
| jzm2k wrote:
| Could you elaborate on why it can't scale if it's
| stateful?
| KirillPanov wrote:
| That should probably read "doesn't scale without
| centralization".
|
| The full answer to that question is way, way, way beyond
| the appropriate length for an HN comment.
|
| DHTs need to accept requests from any random IP address,
| anywhere on the Internet. If you allocate state, you have
| to deal with resource exhaustion attacks. Dealing with
| them turns out to be way harder than anybody thinks when
| they first start down this path.
|
| Cloudflare and Google can use stateful HTTP(S) because
| they are so massive. They can employ hordes of people to
| constantly tune DOS filters to block griefers before
| state allocation occurs, and lawyers to deal with any
| griefers who are as large as they are. If you're happy
| with that kind of centralization you shouldn't be wasting
| your time with DHTs; you don't need them.
|
| Aside from resource exhaustion attacks, there are some
| pretty deep lessons connected to systems and
| architecture. The bittorrent bootstrap nodes serve some
| really insane number of requests/second on very modest
| hardware (I'm still trying to find the link that detailed
| this...). The Internet root zone DNS servers were, for a
| very long time (and perhaps still today in one or two
| cases) just a few good workstations at universities.
|
| Sessionless protocols scale like crazy, on cheap
| hardware. But they are very hard to design correctly. If
| you have VC bucks, spend them on hardware and use
| sessionful protocols.
| survirtual wrote:
| You can restrict DHTs to accept well-formed requests and
| further restrict them using a web of trust. With a large
| enough network and an on onboarding path using nodes that
| have higher bandwidth, it can work to mitigate that
| vector I'd think.
|
| It would be really hard to launch that attack with a DHT
| that implements appropriate pruning, drop, and block
| rules for bad behavior. All that can feed into a personal
| (& autonomous) web of trust. Any references for me to
| read more about this?
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > an on onboarding path using nodes that have higher
| bandwidth
|
| i.e. Cloudflare. It works great. It is centralized.
|
| > Any references for me to read more about this?
|
| https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html
|
| https://zetok.github.io/tox-spec/
| password4321 wrote:
| > _my own solution that did everything I wanted_
|
| Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to
| your newsletter!
|
| (I really would appreciate any pointers to additional info on
| something that actually works...)
| survirtual wrote:
| If you find something, let me know. It would save me a lot
| of trouble.
|
| Until then, what I'm building unfortunately doesn't seem to
| have a peer. So I will keep at it. If it gets to a point
| where I believe it can be useful to others, I will share it
| freely.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > If it gets to a point where I believe it can be useful
| to others, I will share it freely.
|
| It sounds very useful already.
|
| I'd love to see the code even if it's not in a quite
| working state yet.
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| I'll second that - even if the code is currently in poor
| condition. IPFS sounds great but it has a bad reputation
| for performance/resource hogging but from your original
| comment that seems to be the least of its issues. I'd
| love to use something like that for my project.
| survirtual wrote:
| Trust me, when I can share I will, and gladly at that.
| Hopefully it will be useful and many other people take up
| the cause. After that I'm taking a rest-of-my-life
| adventure around the world's most pristine wildernesses.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I'm building a connectivity lib in Golang for relay-
| assisted p2p over tcp. The implementation is simple, uses
| only a single network connection when idle, and establishes
| connections very quickly and reliably. Downside is it's not
| decentralized and it's also not UDP, in case that's your
| thing. Oh and BYO auth.
|
| Please reach out if it fits your use case.
| oldgregg wrote:
| Contact info? I'm currently developing a p2p tcp library
| in Golang based off perlin-network/noise which is a very
| clean implementation but abandoned.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Sounds great, definitely some overlap there.
|
| Added to my user page to avoid creating a permanent
| record. I'll reply with my personal.
| steponlego wrote:
| Works great, that's old news which is no longer current.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| ZFS (Zettabyte File System) is very much separate from
| Z-Library (and its alternative frontends like libgen).
| Nican wrote:
| Thanks. My brain crossed wires between Z-Library and IPFS. I
| updated my post.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Completely understandable!
| jraby3 wrote:
| I got an error when visiting zlib.zu1k.com/. Error code: 1020 Ray
| ID: 7819e5389c898e4e Country: IL Data center: tlv03 IP:
| 85.65.187.66 Timestamp: 2022-12-30 09:54:40 UTC
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Same here. Was working a few hours ago.
| neop1x wrote:
| People should stop over-using CloudFlare for everything. IMO it
| is not good for IFS "hosting", either.
|
| They act like gatekeepers. Along with blocking, as in this
| case, they make browser assumptions that force visitors to use
| one of the most recent mainstream "approved" and unmodified
| browsers.
|
| For other browsers, they serve "Checking if the site connection
| is secure" with javascript fingerprinting and a captcha, and
| sometimes even solving the captcha won't let me in. i have also
| seen frontends misbehaving due to them not expecting cloudflare
| error response codes.
|
| Some dvelopers apparenly just blindly enable cloudflare and
| don't care. :(
| 0ct4via wrote:
| It's possible they were "hugged" enough to instigate a firewall
| rule dramatically cutting down allowed visitors, which would
| explain the Error 1020.
|
| Might be worth reaching out to the site's creator -- info taken
| from their site [https://zu1k-com/about/]:
|
| "If you have any questions to communicate with me, the
| preferred way is to comment directly in the comment area of the
| corresponding blog post, and I will receive an email
| notification
|
| In addition, you can also reach me in the following ways:
|
| Email: i@zu1k.com
|
| Twitter: @zu1k_lv
|
| GitHub: @zu1k
|
| Keybase: @zu1k
|
| Matrix: @zu1k:mozilla.org
|
| My PGP public key can be obtained at https://pgp.zu1k.com or
| hkps: //keyserver.ubuntu.com
|
| ( 2A65 F6F3 1EDA D922 D7E7 E97B AE38 1A8F B1EF 2CC8)"
| deanc wrote:
| Is the catalog on IPFS different to the catalog available via one
| of the libgen front-ends? I just performed a search on both for
| one title and it found it right away on a libgen front-end, but
| not here.
| [deleted]
| derrida wrote:
| I had the opposite... a book I was looking for on a lib gen
| front end a few days ago but could not find came up here (the
| Narada translation of Dhammapada if curious)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _libgen front-ends_
|
| Libgen is not the same as Z-library, there are many books on Z
| that are not available on libgen.
| Thorentis wrote:
| Where does "Z" exist as an entity, and how does one add books
| to it, or figure out what books belong to Z or not?
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Z-library began as a Libgen mirror but split off and stopped
| sharing uploads. It's kind of scummy, but I guess that just
| means people need to put more effort into uploading its
| contents back to Libgen.
| [deleted]
| causality0 wrote:
| A Z-library who's who would be useful. Is there any relation
| between the original operators and the IPFS effort? What about
| the new .to domain that's as far as I can tell identical in
| functionality to the original z-library?
| sfusato wrote:
| https://zlibrary.to/ (to save a few guesses for interested
| minds)
| marcol1n0 wrote:
| I got an error when visiting zlib.zu1k.com/.
|
| Error code: 1020
|
| Ray ID: 781a36f1b9b0babd
|
| Country: IT
|
| I got an error when visiting zlib.zu1k.com:
|
| Error code: 1020 Ray ID: 781a37c3aeacbae1 Country: IT Data
| center: mxp03 IP: 31.157.83.62 Timestamp: 2022-12-30 10:51:01 UTC
| renaissance_tea wrote:
| Is it dangerous to host sites like this? I love making tools like
| this but worry about the repercussions
| DoItToMe81 wrote:
| Anglo countries tend to aggressively extradite, even for things
| that are not major crimes by their own law, to the US over
| copyright related offences. I'd tread with extreme caution.
| MikusR wrote:
| About as dangerous as using it because ipfs is NOT anonymous.
| Zuiii wrote:
| Seeing that the US managed to extradite a British citizen from
| his own country for hosting links, I would definitely say so.
| The right way is to do this is to host this on tor or similar
| and only advertise it on the internet behind a good vpn.
|
| It's ridiculous that this is what people need to do to help
| others, but that's what ridiculous laws and circus courts get
| you.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Which case are you referring to?
| lioeters wrote:
| > Britain has authorised the extradition to the United
| States of a student who created a website allowing people
| to watch films and television shows for free, the interior
| ministry said on Tuesday.
|
| > ..[The 23-year-old student] allegedly earned tens of
| thousands of pounds (dollars) through advertising on the
| TVShack website before it was closed down by US
| authorities.
|
| > The student would be the first British citizen extradited
| for such an offence. He faces jail if found guilty of the
| charges, which were brought after a crackdown by the US
| Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
|
| > His lawyer had argued in court that the website did not
| store copyright material itself and merely directed users
| to other sites, making it similar to Google.
|
| > The lawyer also argued that his client was being used as
| a "guinea pig" for copyright law in the United States.
|
| https://phys.org/news/2012-03-britain-student-extradition-
| we...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks.
| altilunium wrote:
| I wonder why the very concept of public library is not illegal at
| the first place..
|
| I mean, imagine this concept is being popularized at first in the
| modern era. I'm pretty sure there's a huge opposition, using the
| very same argument as digital pirates & AI art debate : "It could
| damage author's income! People will just go read it for free in
| public library instead of buying it! Public library is morally
| wrong and should be burned!!"
| tredre3 wrote:
| > imagine this concept is being popularized at first in the
| modern era. I'm pretty sure there's a huge opposition
|
| Video rentals have been popularized in the modern era.
|
| Netflix mail rentals have been popularized in the even more
| modern era.
|
| I'm sure some copyright holders argued that they should be
| burned down, but clearly there wasn't a "huge opposition" to
| it?
| gnarbarian wrote:
| I don't know how old you are but there was initially a very
| large amount of opposition to digitizing media delivery over
| traditional methods for fear of piracy. It was a huge problem
| for Netflix.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| That is a crude rendition of the AI art debate, and also of
| piracy.
|
| A public library buys the book. Many people can read it, but it
| guarantees one purchase, and often many libraries will buy the
| book. It also limits the amount of readers to those who live
| relatively nearby. Books were also traditionally written with
| the ideas of libraries in the author's mind, and also many
| authors benefited themselves from libraries.
|
| AI Digital art has many facets which make it detestable for
| some: it floods the market with stuff that can be generated at
| near zero cost, it weakens the connection between people
| because people are no longer looking at something another human
| created, it cheapens the spirit of creation.
|
| While libraries, Library Genesis, and piracy might have some
| facets in common, they are separate entities and should not be
| conflated in any sense.
| altilunium wrote:
| By that logic, then controlled digital lending -- where a
| public digital library buy one digital book and "lend" it by
| artificially limiting the amount of concurrent reader --
| should be legal then, since it simulates the limitation of
| physical library in the digital realm.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It is legal, at least in my country. My library already
| does this.
| fulafel wrote:
| The DRM ebook deals made by libraries don't have the same
| properties as physical book lending. The library is
| essentially covering the rent charged by the ebook
| publisher.
| [deleted]
| Shadowgamer195 wrote:
| It is difficult to determine the quality of content on websites
| like z-lib and libgen because the only available indicators are
| size and a general description of the upload, which can make all
| content appear similar and leave users unable to differentiate
| between high and low quality content.
| nestorD wrote:
| I just did a quick test, it could do with slightly fuzzier
| searching ('Epub' as an extension got me no result while 'epub'
| did, a drop down menu with options might be better/simpler for
| some fields) but, otherwise, it seems functional and useful.
| Cort3z wrote:
| It seems case sensitive on some (or all?) of the input fields.
| At least for the author field in some of my searches.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| FWIW https://libgen.rs already has good search for basically the
| same books. I like the denser layout that makes better use of
| whitespace than this HN submission does.
| mohamez wrote:
| I think the best thing about libgen is their detailed filter to
| search books with covers which makes it really easy to scan
| books you are looking for assuming you know the cover pages.
| altilunium wrote:
| But there's no IPFS link there.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| There is, after you select mirror1, mirror2, etc.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| Has LibGen already caught up to Z-Library? I thought that was
| still very much a work in progress.
| makeworld wrote:
| You can use https://annas-archive.org/
| moffkalast wrote:
| Fantastic, I knew something would come up eventually after the
| old site was taken down.
| jerojero wrote:
| Something that has always bothered me about z-lib and libgen and
| so on is the impossibility of being able to tell quality from the
| different uploads.
|
| Sometimes the epubs are very good, with a good cover and metadata
| as well as chapters and no weird aberrations; other times,
| they're unreadable. But the only thing you have to judge quality
| is size and general description of the upload which in this
| website it's been reduced so everything looks the same.
|
| I think the website looks good, but yeah, would be nice if we
| could rate quality in some way.
| Tams80 wrote:
| Pirates being picky, eh?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the access that libgen and
| z-lib provide and think on the whole it is beneficial to
| society. It is still not paying for people's work though.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| As a counterpoint, have you looked at your local library's
| ebook offerings? Publishers have created a situation where
| digital books are significantly more expensive than physical
| copies and expire far more quickly. We're also just coming
| out of a two year period where physical libraries effectively
| didn't exist and most library systems hadn't expanded their
| digital offerings to meet demand.
|
| I still buy books, but these sites have largely replaced
| traditional libraries for my partner and I because they allow
| us to read what we actually want instead of Oprah's book club
| titles or the 50 digital self-help guides my local library
| stocks with their limited resources. I recognize that they're
| simply serving what most people want, but the alternative for
| me is simply not reading recreationally.
|
| The other side of this conversation is that even if we did
| get rid of pirate libraries there would still be huge,
| unresolved issues with author compensation. There's been a
| _dramatic_ decline in how much authors (and the other people
| directly involved) take home over the past couple decades [1]
| that has little to do with the marginal number of pirate
| readers.
|
| [1] https://authorsguild.org/news/authors-guild-survey-shows-
| dra...
| godelski wrote:
| A big reason piracy exists is because the functionality of
| these systems is better than the official channels. There's a
| reason streaming services led to a dramatic decrease in
| piracy. There's also a reason that piracy is making a return.
| Yeah, pirates are picky and they push other services forward.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| The books are free, if you download the wrong version of a book
| you can simply try another and it costs you no more than a
| minute of your time.
|
| Do you know how it worked before we had the internet for books?
| You had to go to a library yourself, which may have taken an
| hour of your day just in the journey, then hope the library had
| the book you wanted. If not, you may have to wait _weeks_ for
| another library in the system to mail the book to your library.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Large pdf and djvu files generally means low quality scans.
| akiselev wrote:
| I think that really depends on the type of book. I've found
| the large PDFs to be by far the most reliable for books
| printed before the 20th century because - save for Google
| Books - no one's OCR is tuned for the kind of printing
| errors, age related wear and tear, and fonts used over the
| centuries.
|
| Manuscripts (which are admittedly very niche) often have to
| be high resolution scans or photographs just to be readable,
| but zlib and libgen don't really have many of those.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Surely books published before the 20th century are in the
| public domain by now, though?
| akiselev wrote:
| They are but someone has to be in possession of the book
| and go through the trouble of digitizing it. Usually it's
| museums, libraries, and private collections and a variety
| of enthusiasts eventually upload from those sources to
| Zlib/libgen. Since no one cares about copyright there
| anyway it can be more complete in some genres than other
| central databases.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That depends, variously on a number of factors.
|
| A straight-text book can run as little as 500--750 KiB for
| 100--200 pages or so.
|
| ePubs may run smaller as they're a compressed archive of HTML
| files, so how large the straight text is is largely a matter
| of the additional markup and stylesheets applied. I've
| generated PDFs from Markdown which are fairly comparable.
|
| Most mainstream trade press books run about 3--6 MiB as PDFs,
| if they have few images or graphics.
|
| Books _with_ a heavy graphics content can easily swell to 30
| --300 MiB.
|
| And scanned rather than generated PDFs tend to run similarly
| sized. _Many_ of those scans are, however, excellent quality.
|
| The largest ebook within my own collection for quite some
| time was a copy of Lyell's _Geography_ , downloaded from the
| Internet Archive and based on a library scan of a 19th-
| century printing. On a colour tablet, it's actually pretty
| nice reading, on a B&W E-ink tablet, such scans often have a
| significant background ghosting which may or may not be
| eliminated by contrast adjustments in your reader.
|
| For newer materials, I've seen any number of issues with
| ebooks:
|
| - Clean single-page scans with OCR'd text for highlighting
| and copy/paste are generally my favourite. There's something
| about original print layouts that I still find preferable to
| ePubs and other digital-native formats.
|
| - Native PDF can also be quite good though they're far more
| prone to designeritis, where someone has thought they could
| improve over ink-on-paper conventions. If you think you can
| do this, you are almost certainly wrong.
|
| - ePubs rerendered as PDFs are among the worst options. I
| prefer PDFs generally, but not in this case.
|
| - ePubs ... can ... be reasonably good, though again the
| principle problem is excessive flexibility for designers.
| Less is more. I _really_ miss having a single consistent
| layout of the text, rather than something which reflows as
| font faces, sizes, and spacing are changed. As a saving
| grace, cringeworthy (and migrane-inducing) font choices can
| be overridden with The One True Serif Font.
|
| - Various low-quality scans. 2-up, lots of page skew and
| placement variation, heavily-marked texts, and such. I'll
| _still_ almost always prefer these to an ePub or other
| digital-native format, though the reading can be much harder.
|
| - Tiny-font 3-column scientific publications. Even on my 13"
| e-ink reader, these can be a challenge, and I'll occasionally
| resort to a sub-page rendering (this is natively supported in
| the Onyx NeoReader and several other e-book readers). Why
| such publications _continue_ to insist on this format as we
| approach the 2nd quarter of the 21st century I 've no idea at
| all. Scans based on older journal pubs (from ~1950s -- 1980s
| or so) with both physical wear and scan artefacts can be
| especially challenging.
| leokennis wrote:
| One mitigating factor is that it's very easy to "correct" all
| but the very worst ebooks in Calibre:
|
| - Metadata and a cover are one click away
|
| - Removing excessive spacing, padding etc. is a few clicks
| fud101 wrote:
| Super fast. What's the tech stack?
| uwagar wrote:
| jesus cloudflare getting in the way.
| unraveller wrote:
| >You do not have access to zlib.zu1k.com. The site owner may
| have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site.
|
| I think I hit the cf limit after 10 searches.
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| You mean, the owner has configured Cloudflare to aggressively
| restrict access
| bertman wrote:
| https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-searcher
| baptiste313 wrote:
| Indeed the site seems to be down but you can use this site as an
| alternative:
|
| - https://zlib.freedit.eu
|
| Or else the project is opensource you can install it by yourself:
|
| - https://github.com/zu1k/zlib-searcher
| benevol wrote:
| Well, nice work. But poor authors...
| thinkmcfly wrote:
| I get the feeling that poor authors stand to lose the least
| from this kind of thing
| [deleted]
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| If you like a book, buy it. I do. I love physical books. But,
| my interests are varied enough that I need multiple sources -
| sometimes I'm only mildly curious. Libby/Overdrive has been a
| lifesaver in this regard.
|
| I would love to have a digital library of my physical books
| though, and that's where this is coming in handy because I
| don't want to buy it twice, especially when the ebook almost
| costs the same as the physical one. It would be nice if there
| was a "for ${1..5} more, get the digital one too!" - but then
| there's DRM to fight with also.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| There is no evidence that piracy hurts authors. It might hurt
| publishers (although finding evidence of that has been hard
| too).
| lxgr wrote:
| And you are absolutely sure that there is no causal
| relationship between publishers getting paid and authors
| getting paid?
|
| Yes, the status quo is ridiculous, with libraries having to
| limit "copies" of ebooks and even simulating wear and tear of
| these on one side, and having to deal with DRM buying books
| on the other.
|
| But according to at least one author that I'd trust in the
| matter, publishers also provide valuable services to them,
| such as taking the financial risk of the first print run
| (including editing, marketing etc.) and paying authors
| upfront for it.
|
| That said, I really hope that we'll see an "iTunes store for
| ebooks" (open format, no DRM) sooner rather than later.
| SpelingBeeChamp wrote:
| Anyone know of a similar search engine that allows the user to
| filter search results by year?
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