[HN Gopher] Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground ...
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Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of
Knowledge (2018) [pdf]
Author : simonpure
Score : 144 points
Date : 2023-11-05 20:50 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (direct.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (direct.mit.edu)
| Xerox9213 wrote:
| Interesting. The authors focused a lot on competing with market
| vs archival purposes. For me, and I reckon a lot of other people,
| I used libgen because I just want a PDF or epub that is not
| muddied with DRM or behind a university wall. Most of the books I
| download I already have a paper copy of, but want to be able to
| use it digitally. For me it's all about convenience. I guess that
| would be pretty hard to measure.
| unixhero wrote:
| I used it to not have to pay.
|
| I buy 10 books per year off Amazon and the occasional Economist
| magazine. I am of course not paying for academic journal access
| or tons of academic books outside my field.
| dacryn wrote:
| I use it to wade through the masses.
|
| Download 10 ebooks on a subject, scroll through, read a few
| excerpts, and the one that I actually start reading, I buy
| from amazon or a local bookstore and actually read it.
|
| Many books look great, but once you start reading them, are
| total garbage. This is in the field of IT literature though,
| so books tend to be very hit or miss, and quickly outdated.
| kqr wrote:
| This is close to my use case as well. I mainly buy e-books
| these days, but they are often published as an afterthought[1]
| and not designed for readers - things like maths and plots get
| mangled in the process and vary from excellent to completely
| unreadable. So I want something closer to the physical book to
| look up the equations and visuals, but I don't want to have to
| go to the library[2] for each one. A PDF scan of the print book
| is very convenient.
|
| [1] Sometimes they are literally an OCR of the print book! You
| can tell because of the symbol substitutions.
|
| [2] Even most digital libraries I've tried are very
| inconvenient to "go to". Archive.org might be the exception.
| posterboy wrote:
| > Sometimes they are literally an OCR of the print book! You
| can tell because of the symbol substitutions.
|
| Not really. TEX for example does a lot of weird character
| substitution behind the scenes to mangle the layout.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| how often does TEX substitute "rn" for "m" though?
| fyokdrigd wrote:
| it's actually very easy to measure. the audience here is close
| to the 1%, so your usecase is already discarded in the grand
| scheme with a 2% error margin when measuring behavior for the
| large population.
| vmfunction wrote:
| Yup hnews is not a good place to do market research for
| general population.
| crest wrote:
| But it is a good place to get an insight into what _could_
| motivate enough technically minded (and connected) people to
| sustain such risky projects.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| my friend in college bought texts books before the first
| semester when their parents took them to the book store. then a
| classmate showed them libgen and didn't buy any more text books
| except the one weird custom textbook by some professor.
|
| i guess they buy all their books now that they have a job, but
| also with generous use of used book stores and physical
| libraries.
|
| oh and dont buy though amazon, especially kindle.
| aegypti wrote:
| This pretty much mirrors my experience exactly, but these
| days I lean a lot more heavily on the Libby app for borrowing
| from my library which is _amazing_.
|
| What's the issue with Amazon/Kindle though, the fakes?
| LesZedCB wrote:
| their de-facto monopoly status on basically all things
| books and increasingly on publishing, and of course their
| absolutely inane DRM.
|
| libby is amazing, people are completely sleeping on it if
| you're not using it. free e-books!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Talking to some students, I'm told that people often freely
| pass a book on to the next semester's students.
| eclecticfrank wrote:
| Libgen fills an important gap in the paid archives/libraries.
| There are always some books, papers or articles that are not
| available through my university library.
|
| It's a huge help to have documents available immediately and not
| having to pay a small fortune for a single document that might
| prove irrelevant.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Great to see this here.
|
| The author Balazs Bodo is an all around great guy with very
| refreshing research methods and an immensely broad portfolio of
| things he works on [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html#Publica...
| crvdgc wrote:
| Interesting research. However, in practical terms, I wouldn't
| count Kindle as a form of digital availability, unless the book
| is composed of pure text.
|
| Browsing figures or tables is usually a very bad experience. The
| figures are usually in low resolution. And the tables are
| sometime just pictures. Even if the publisher bothered to encode
| the table as a table, if it spans over one screen size,
| navigation becomes very hard. Not to mention symbols and
| formulas.
| hodanli wrote:
| This is an incredibly valuable resource for those outside of the
| US and EU, where the prices for books in English (imported) are
| extremely high.
| JacobSeated wrote:
| Not to devalue the tireless work of authors, but we must also
| recognize that students in particular do not have enough money to
| pay for all these books.
|
| At the same time, it can be argued that writing a single book,
| and selling it thousands times over, is a bit to "easy" in terms
| of ways to make money. The hard part is to get people to actually
| buy your book - it does not matter that you wrote the best book
| in the world if nobody gives you well deserved attention for it.
|
| Bloggers suffer from the same problem, and it is not necessarily
| because their work is bad. The truth of the matter just is,
| nobody cares about quality information anymore (And I am guilty
| of this as well).
|
| We want fast and summarized answers so we can move on to the
| important part: solving whatever concrete problem we are working
| on.
|
| AI will probably delude the little remaining value of information
| even further, and at a point, nobody will manually write
| comprehensive information anymore. At least not unassisted by AI,
| and while the quality may suffer, we must also realize that we do
| not really need 100% accurate information. If we get a
| statistically significant amout of accurate AI provided
| information, then there is no need for anyone to write books
| anymore. It will be a complete unappreciated waste of their time,
| and nobody is going to buy them.
|
| Even now that I am in a decent job, I still prefer not to buy
| books, instead relying on free sources on the internet (not
| piracy). If a given book/information is not available for free,
| then it is often not important enough for me to bother (note
| often - not always).
|
| It is also a matter of prioritizing - reading a book takes me way
| too long, and the process is far-from comfortable due to my slow
| reading, and for that reason alone I tend to avoid reading entire
| books. It strikes me as an antiquated way to gain information
| even without AI. I may open a specific chapter of interest, but
| reading the entire thing is painfully tedious, and probably
| unnecessary.
| squigz wrote:
| Why do people buy books now, instead of just reading reviews?
| eclecticfrank wrote:
| Obvious troll, but anyway: Reviews are there to help identify
| if books are worth reading/buying. Reviews cannot and are not
| supposed to replace books.
| squigz wrote:
| Well I'm certainly not trolling you but okay. Have a good
| day.
| sycamoretrees wrote:
| Why do people go to see movies when they could just watch the
| trailer on YouTube?
| squigz wrote:
| Well I'm not the one claiming people are going to stop
| reading because of AI, so I'm not the one to ask :)
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I don't understand this question. Book reviews are not
| summaries. And even they were, "why do people read books,
| instead of just reading summaries?" is still a ridiculous
| question.
| squigz wrote:
| It is ridiculous. That's the point. Same as suggesting
| people would stop reading books in favor of summaries
| written by AI
|
| And indeed, 'review' was the wrong word to use, but I
| appreciate you understanding what I meant
| agumonkey wrote:
| people do watch movies / show in 1.5x now.. it's common.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >but we must also recognize that students in particular do not
| have enough money to pay for all these books.
|
| Sure they do. They happen to be able to pay for food, water,
| electricity, rent, tuition, transportation, pens, pencils,
| paper, etc just fine.
| fragmede wrote:
| by "just fine", you mean "go into crippling amounts of debt
| that isn't dischargeable by bankruptcy"?
| JR1427 wrote:
| Academic books are terribly expensive.
|
| When I was at university (Oxford, UK, 2009), I bought about
| four key books, and spent well over 100GBP. I simply couldn't
| afford more. I had a student loan which covered tuition and
| some of my living costs, as well as a bursary from the
| university which covered some of my other living costs (but
| not all!).
|
| What was annoying was that our library didn't have enough
| books for all the students. We'd all be assigned the same
| reading list for the week, and then have to race to the
| library to get the books before they were all gone.
| abridges6523 wrote:
| "Just fine" here means riddled with debt.
| gizajob wrote:
| If people could download any of those things for free off the
| internet, they would.
| webefbskj wrote:
| Imagine someone from a 3rd world country. Let's say India.
|
| Even the books like K&R C, Tanenbaum operating systems or
| CLRS / Skienna Algorithms will be north of 1000 INR in India.
|
| Count 5 - 6 such books per semester, that's at least 5k - 10k
| INR. But for obscure books the price often goes to 5K for a
| single book. Let's say 10K INR.
|
| Which is a significant amount, and for some students can
| exceed a month's living expenses for a semester.
|
| So they're hesitant to spend that much. Often they end up
| with shittily written local books.
|
| Now imagine you want to consult some book for specialist
| topics, like Windows internals or something, you will have to
| sell an organ.
|
| Source: I was the Indian student.
| taopai wrote:
| I read lots of non fiction books. I think the same.
|
| Most of them could condense it's contents in a couple of
| chapters.
|
| It would be great to have modular books, like Emacs manual. If
| sections where independent modules you could rearange the book
| or even create books from a series of sections from diferent
| books.
|
| That way you could choose different outlines, maybe predefined
| by the author like, to create books tailed to your needs:
|
| - General Ideas.
|
| - General Ideas + observed cases
|
| - Mixed outline (Concepts + Stories + Conclusions)
|
| - All details about one topic
| generalizations wrote:
| This is what's done with sufficiently academic books in the
| hard sciences. They are so modular, that books are simply
| topics with each chapter written by a chosen author, and
| those authors will treat the chapters they've written
| similarly to papers they've had published.
|
| I think if you dive deeper in to more rigorous nonfiction
| books you'll find that less time is spent on the 'pop' side
| of popsci literature. Which might be where you're
| encountering that fluff.
| fikama wrote:
| I am curious, what books you found important enough to bother?
| So my list of (shame) books to read could grow even longer.
| Cenk wrote:
| If you are interested in Library Genesis (and shadow libraries in
| general) I can recommend this book by Joe Karaganis:
| https://boook.link/Shadow-Libraries
| abridges6523 wrote:
| But which shadow library can I find this book on?
| Funes- wrote:
| Just click on "PDF".
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| PDFs suck on e-readers.
|
| But you can get an epub on at least one of the shadow
| libraries :)
| t-3 wrote:
| They aren't too bad with modern reader software, you can
| automatically trim margins and set the viewport size and
| scan pattern to match the text (makes double-column
| papers much nicer to read).
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| In Spain my home internet provider (Movistar) blocks access to
| LibGen and the like. My university, however, does not. It
| realizes that de facto these sources serve as the library for its
| professors. So I wind up having to connect through the university
| VPN anyway ...
| dzonga wrote:
| library genesis is a god-send.
|
| there's plenty of out of print books or that you won't find at
| specialized retailers but would find on lib-gen.
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(page generated 2023-11-08 23:02 UTC)