this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Libgen.is is back online (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Nice!

Also, this site tracks the uptime of LG and other pirate libraries: SLUM: The Shadow Library Uptime Monitor.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

An alternative is plain old school irc. I'm not kidding.
Connect to irc.irchighway.net then /j #ebooks then !search <author and/or title>
Receive search results via xdcc which gives you the commands to download that stuff.
Or query one of the bots (e. g. @bsk) and get a list of hundreds of thousands of books that are available and search that for what you want.

I prefer that over ad infested one click hosters with countdowns, link shortener cascades and captchas. I find and get the stuff much faster by using irc.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't #ebooks basically just mirror Libgen?

Among the major book downloading websites, only libgen.li has ads, and only Anna's Archive has a countdown.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

#ebooks is composed of datahoarders that have a lot of stuff available. You declare the data source you're getting the book from (e.g. Oatmeal) and then the name of the book.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm not sure if #ebooks mirrors Libgen. I wouldn't be surprised if they copy from each other.

I have allergies against ads, countdowns, etc. The interweb is polluted with that stuff and so are most piracy sites.

I find irc to be much easier to use than the alternatives. Just a click to start hexchat and then it auto-connects to the right server and auto-joins the right channel. All within seconds. I even get my animes from irc like I did in 2005. 😁

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I’m not sure if #ebooks mirrors Libgen. I wouldn’t be surprised if they copy from each other.

It is unclear to me what's the method to upload to #ebooks. I've uploaded some obscure books to Libgen in the past, so I checked whether they're available on #ebooks, and they're not. So... they don't mirror each other. I checked both UnderNet and IRCHighway, and the latter even directed me to these websites in case I'm looking for textbooks. It doesn't seem like an adequate replacement for LG, at least for my purposes.

I have allergies against ads, countdowns, etc. The interweb is polluted with that stuff and so are most piracy sites.

As I've said, this is not a big issue with the sites listed on the uptime tracker I linked. Libgen.is and Z-library have neither (the latter has daily download limits per IP), AA has a countdown (not always), and libgen.li has ads (which I had no idea about until I saw other people mentioning it, thanks to uBlock).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

it's pretty cool that folks are still doing it that way. maybe I'll make an account and suck some dicks

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Neat. If only I actually read what I download. Ngl, the only book that I've read start to end in the last 8 years was the easy way to stop smoking by alen carr

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I used short essays and short stories to get back into reading, maybe that approach would help you. They're really old, but try A Modest Proposal or some of the satirical essays by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), they're short and sweet and inspire a desire for more.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

If you like reading older books, check out https://standardebooks.org/. They make nice digital editions of public domain works for free.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Nice, looks like a bit more care went into the visual presentation in comparison to Project Gutenberg. Thanks for sharing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For me the amount is not a problem. I used to be an avid reader during my teens, I've read under two hundred books during that period, ranging from fiction to romance. The problem usually is that I'm bored reading them now. I'd prefer reading the entirety of GNU C Manual now because it feels more productive. But fret not, when I burn out of IT, quit and touch grass I will absolutely come back to reading my favorite stories, especially the one where a small mousy mouse fell in love with a scary kaiman and they lived happily ever after after surviving through hell together.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I read a ton as a kid too (probably averaged 3-5 books a week for many years), as an adult it's hard to escape the cycle of wanting to feel productive but I've since tried my best to remember that reading for pleasure isn't meant to be productive in the capitalist sense. It's an investment in your own happiness, in my opinion, and that can be productive in other ways. Trying new genres or quick "summer reads" has helped me not get bored.

I mostly just don't read much because I have other hobbies I like more and tend to watch a lot of video content and browse social media. I didn't really do any of those things much as a teen, other than a bit of Facebook because everyone had it. For me it's not the priority that it used to be, but I have a book server for easy access when I get the urge.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's an investment in your own happiness, in my opinion, and that can be productive in other ways.

I find this profound. Might as well invest in my own happiness right now, it's gonna be a long night anyways 😁

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I find reading books quite meditative and I like the initial challenge of maintaining my concentration for the first 10 minutes or so before I can relax and sink into it a bit. I sympathise with everyone else struggling to read as much as an adult though, it was so much easier for me during childhood. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed about how little I read now given how advanced I was as a kid. It feels like I've been wasting a skill/hobby that could have provided me with a lot of happiness and growth as an adult.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I decided to push my gaming to only evenings because I was unhappy with how much time it consumed, so now I read during the day.

I don't know if you play video games so this may not be helpful to you, but doing this skyrocketed my reading.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Did it work?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It worked immediatly as I finished the book and I didn't smoke for 5 months so far

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago

Piracy may have saved your life!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Edit: replied to gur wrong comment. Sorry

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Unforgivable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Hahaha!!!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Convert them to audiobooks. You don't get the voice acting benefits, but at least you can listen to them while you're doing something else.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Been there, done that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Convert them to audiobooks

You can just do that? Easily and in halfway decent quality?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

On Linux, it's pretty painless. Takes a while, depending on the length.

This is what I use.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Use @Voice aloud reader on Android.

[–] MelonYellow 5 points 1 week ago

Same here. I've been reading Steven King's The Stand for like 2 years now😆

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

It's a very good book though

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

[–] UnrepententProcrastinator 8 points 1 week ago

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Is there some more background to this, as in, what happened?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

It's been offline for like a month, maybe more, I haven't kept track. I don't know any details, maybe there's info on their forums, but overall the owners are quite secretive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

For years they've managed to keep their indexing (think html, not torrent) online by separating out the indexing from the actual storage. They've only changed URLs once in recent memory. Throughout the years they've stored content in various places. Protected safe havens, compromised websites, and ipfs.

There are still a lot of places in the world where hosting a link to data is not illegal.

Well through whatever methods required it looks like the publishers finally managed to shut down the search/hosting on wherever .is was pointing to.

There is a static IPFS index laying around somewhere so technically the content's still quite available. Along with Torrents.

Well they finally managed to bring it back up somewhere and I don't even care to go and figure out where that is. Just glad they're still around.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What is on libgen? Movies? Animes? Songs?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

Books. They have both non-fiction and fiction. Between this and Anna's Archive I haven't paid for a book in years.