Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds

> Z-Library, or a similar website, is helpful to students living in poverty (82% agree).

I would really like to hear the reason for the 18% who thinks that it is not helpful for poor students. Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?

I mean I understand that some people will just want these sites gone on IP grounds or because it is against the law ..etc. But this question was different.

> Is it this complicated argument that they will discourage authors from writing books and then this will hurt all students in a hypothetical scenario? Or there are other reasons?

That really can't be it because the question isn't about whether it is moral, legal or good for publishers.

I really think this is just elitism and gatekeeping at its worst.

I’d guess the easiest explanation (which admittedly erases all nuance) is that folks just misinterpreted the question and reflexively dismissed it as soon as they saw “Z-Library” and “Helpful”.

I’d also be inclined to discard theoretical “in the long run it’ll be unhelpful” concerns, since that opens up an infinitely-deep can of hypothetical contrived scenarios of arbitrary complexity that can’t be disproven. I’m sure there are very real concerns, but it’s impossible to reason about which concerns specifically people would care about.

IMO that leaves the purely practical concerns:

- Students in poverty might not have reliable internet, devices or digital literacy. If zlib isn’t available to them, it isn’t helpful

- Books available might not cater to the local language/culture, or the real world curriculum needs of those students. If zlib doesn’t help them succeed, it isn’t helpful

- The interface sucks and is confusing, which makes students struggle to find what‘s useful. If zlib isn’t useable for them, it isn’t helpful

"Educated slaves are unhappy"

That's why this _can_ be it. If authors stop writing books it will hurt students (who wont have books to read). Nothing to do with ethics or morals.

I would assume that a good chunk of students in poverty simply don't have a device that works well for consuming books on.

If you don't have a tablet or laptop, just a phone with a small screen, I can see people saying z-lib isn't helpful for them. That they'll just use physical books at their library. (And students without computers is definitely still a thing, that's why computer labs still exist.)

I can definitely imagine a lot of undergrads who would assume that if a book isn't available in their college library then they'd never need it anyways. (Rightly or wrongly.)

And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)

Some 28 years ago I taught myself everything could get/find from graphic design, basic development, server administration, etc, all downloading commercial warez over dial-up with AOL and Usenet. I didn't need a class or subscriptions, with every software and book I could have wanted, I had the best lab in the world with any software available I could want with piracy.

Fast forward 30 years now it's mostly the same as it was, only open source replaced all the commercial, and little has changed that I can still get the rest too. You can pay as much or little as you want in life if you know how.

You said you relied on piracy.

But piracy means you were in spirit and partly in reality stealing the work product of those who learned a few years before you.

Would you want your work value to be diluted by piracy?

What’s the lizardman constant? 4% or so? There’s some of it.

If I take your car, you are now without a car. If I copy your software, you still have your software. If I was never going to buy your software in the first place, you have lost nothing.

Enough with the false equivalence.

Any Millennial could tell you that that particular social contract was already well on its way through the shredder, even as early as '96 (traditional pensions would have been gone at that point). The people who came before us have done quite a bit of their own thievery.

IME, the expansion of piracy follows a contraction of purchasing power without a commensurate contraction of the expectation to consume media/information. E.g., young people would still be surreptitiously downloading ripped MP3s if Spotify didn't exist, because the economic wherewithal to buy a bunch of CDs just isn't there anymore.

>And remember that so many textbooks now contain a mandatory online component where assignments get submitted and tests are taken, so you're forced to buy it even if z-lib has it. (I'm not defending that... just explaining it.)

It's a disgrace that universities are willing to use books that have been turned into consumable goods by single-use software or usurious saas rental messes.

You wouldn't download a car ...

Maybe they do not need more textbooks? If they do not need to follow newest version of it, they can get second hand book.

If.

I've paid for things when I could have gotten it for free, and also taken things for free when I should have paid for it.

Enough with the false dichotomy.

I could play devils advocate and say that it’s bad for poor students because if authors are not fairly compensated then these authors won’t write textbooks and if they don’t then future students won’t benefit from having the textbooks.

I would prefer for my work value to be multiplied by piracy, personally.

Piracy isn't stealing. Legally or morally.

You know what is stealing? The heavily lengthened copyright term. Every day that has been and will be added to that, is a day that was stolen from the public ownership of the work, as prescribed in copyright law.

If you don't have a laptop, the place you live in / study at probably doesn't have a good public library.

There is value in freely available copies of software for people to learn on. This increases the number of people in the market who can use it, which in turn increases the number of businesses that can effectively run it.

I don’t think the preference for open source these days is an accident. It’s what kids learned on growing up, because it was the easiest to access, and they kept using it.

Give away the software to people learning, then change corporations to use it. The companies get changed more, and absorb the cost, because it’s subsidizing the education of their future employees.

Maybe I was a bad student, but I stopped buying books after my freshman year, unless there was a very specific reason to have it. I really didn’t use most of them.

I still remember one professor my senior year saying we needed the book to do problems he would assign, and we wouldn’t pass without it. I opened the book one time for a problem that we worked on in class. It could have easily been projected up on the board or printed as a hand out. It’s been 20 years and I’m still a little bitter. I felt lied to and cheated; most of us did.

They're talking about learning, probably as a broke teenager who wouldn't have been able to pay anything, I think you can save the outrage.

Mee too! Although I like the mentality of "make it easier to use without piracy than with" (i.e excessive drm)

there's where you're wrong...

Few academic authors are in it for the money.

I mean yeah, getting your work published just means that you can sue if someone steals it (often the case with those university presidents that they plagiarized work from undergrads or those who otherwise couldn't fight back). But if publishers stop making money off academic texts, then they won't be inclined to fight those battles. Then again, a lot of the money comes from university library subscriptions to entire catalogues of texts including books and articles, so either something you want to access is already in your ecosystem or it isn't.

At my first company out of University, we found our app was being distributed on "piracy" versions of the Play Store, with all the IAPs bypassed and given for free. We spent months cracking down on it, and the end result was bugs in our detection system negatively affected our users, and I believe we also introduced a crash which hurt our Play Store ranking.

I still remember having a meeting about it with the CEO, as we all collectively realized that blocking the free version of our app made no positive impact whatsoever.

It depends on your major. For those who study English, for instance, many of the assigned books are out of copywrite already. And new books are market price so they won't be more than 20 dollars. And if you're in a not so conservative English department a lot of the "theory" texts, aside from the more obscure ones, are freely available online because they're written by people who care more about intellectual freedom than making a buck or two.

Academic textbooks are mostly a racket, forced upon a captive market (the student body) and - with rare but notable exceptions - not books that most students would care to hold onto after graduation.

Historically, your lazier instructor took problem sets out of these books which put extra pressure on students to buy them. There's also the accelerated edition turnover in the publishing industry, so that teachers always get the latest edition, which has slightly different problem sets than the one from two years ago, even if the material is the same as it was two decades ago. It's hard to feel much pity for any lost sales suffered by those outfits due to online distribution of current texts.

Today, any instructor with access to an LLM can come up with unique problem sets and solutions with relatively little effort for a whole semester's coursework, and just do that every time they teach the course. Yes students will just use LLMs to help them solve the LLM-generated questions - so more in-class quiz sessions are likely to become the norm.

I dont have to like it but if we are doing competitive capitalism we should upgrade the citizens as much as possible. In stead of publicly funded limitations we should spend the money on the opposite. If we want to win the game that is.

I'll still never forget the day I learned about the existence of Z-library.

I was doing a summer research term with one of my professors and he recommended a textbook so I pulled it up on Amazon only for him to shake his head and show me Z-library.

I just remember thinking "wait why didn't you tell our class about this site earlier?!"

What a strange perspective. How does piracy dilute the work's value? I would think most informative/artistic work is elevated by spreading awareness to more people. For a lot of creators that's a primary goal (otherwise there is easier work to be had).

What is lost by piracy is some potential cold hard cash for a copy of the work, which partially filters down to the creator. Also "control" of the distribution, for whatever that's worth.

No problem if you totally hate piracy, but at least be honest about what it is and what it impacts.

The cost of making 100 units of software is the same as the cost of making 100k units of software. There’s a relatively fixed population of people who pirate software (i.e. people who are independently good at cracking or knowledgeable enough to apply cracks) so the answer is typically to just sell more software and the percentage lost through pirating goes down.

It becomes a problem when piracy becomes a percentage of revenue no matter what scale you’re in. This is when even Joe Shmoe knows about and can use the cracked version (e.g. WinRAR). Though I can hardly think of cases like these where your brand recognition wouldn’t also be pretty high and usable to pivot to another product.

It isn’t stealing or piracy. Stealing involves taking a resource, which makes it unavailable to others and causes the legitimate owner to have one fewer of the thing.

Piracy is stealing, typically on boats, with a threat of violence involved.

This is unauthorized copying. It does devalue the work of the copyright holder. It is illegal in many jurisdictions. It costs the legitimate owner something, the opportunity of a sale, but it doesn’t actually cause the legitimate owner to have fewer copies of the thing to sell.

If the perpetrator was some kid with no money, the opportunity denied to the copyright owner was pretty minimal. I mean we should be honest about it, unauthorized copying is bad. But it is much less bad than stealing and it is not anywhere near piracy (applying the name piracy to unauthorized copying was some over-dramatic silly nonsense).

Yes, this is how textbook manufactures sell to university. One time codes for online exercises / labs. This happens mostly for intro classes. I have no idea why universities do this, my guess is they are sold on hw problems being randomized so it makes cheating more difficult.

Never forget Aaron Swartz

The idea in industry that pirated copies represent "lost sales" is wishful thinking. The reality is, people who can afford to pay for media/apps/programs/books can and do; the people who pirate such digital goods overwhelmingly either cannot afford to purchase a legitimate copy, or simply wouldn't be interested in paying for it without knowing whether they'd like what they were getting, were a pirated copy not be available.

Additionally, not all pirates are the selfish monsters that MPAA, RIAA, and friends would have you believe: many pirates, including several I know personally, use pirated media as a preview, and go on to pay for the content they actually enjoyed, yet wouldn't have done so without the option to pirate to know whether or not the media is worth the asking price to begin with.

An MBA could be coaxed into admitting that in those cases, piracy actually creates sales that wouldn't have otherwise happened.

Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets. If you used an LLM, you'd have to proof every single problem to make sure there weren't issues with it that would lead to student's having unintended difficulties with them. Yes it "saves time," until a problem is assigned whose "right answer" takes not only far longer than all the others but is ridiculously complex and impossible to grade or complete in any reasonable amount of time.

Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself, and it also keeps answers from circulating amongst students, and saves time for the professor who won't have to do the above every single week, they can just pick however many problems they like out of the book for the relevant section.

If I hadn't pirated Photoshop when I was a kid I would have just never used it.

The question here isn't that adobe would have seem more money, it's that a 12 year old would have not made some image macros.

Especially in the age of DRM (enshittification of ownership), where many games that lose functionality when the developer shuts down servers, where ebooks routinely get redacted, rewritten, or censored, where the availability of movies you "bought" shifts year by year as licensing changes occur, it is evident that "buying" no longer means "owning", and if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

Copyright and patents actively stifle innovation. I think a statute of 5 years for both is acceptable. If you fail to be commercially viable in 5 years it probably wasn't on the cards but at least someone can learn from the work and continue with it after it lapses.

On VirusTotal, 5 different vendors flag Z-Library as malicious. Are they just flagging the site because of IP issues, or is the site full of malware?

Both are blatantly anti-competitive measures.

When my courses had profs who had written the book, they'd have the school book store print and bind them to booklets, and sell them for close enough to cost, and also put up a download link for the pdf

You could just as easily argue the software or content should be released for free as it's associated with effectively zero marginal cost.

> Ok, a publisher stakes their reputation on having reliable problem sets.

Who gives a damn about publishers?

They introduce artificial distribution costs; They are not capable of or refuse to fact-check; the copy-editing they provide is well within the capabilities of ai; at best they introduce asset-providers (eg illustrators) to writers.

> Switching the problem sets every couple years is a difficult task in and of itself

Who cares? The western academic system is already laughably bad at weeding out the incapable. Just let people cheat. It's not like people aren't cheating already.

When I went to college, two of the calc professors were married. They co-authored the calc book… for calc 1, 2, and 3. Did not matter which class you were taking, (1,2, or 3) one was required to buy the whole book.

They changed the problem sets once a year. So at minimum you were basically obligated to buy the book twice, if not 3 times.

100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop.

These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.

> The findings, however, suggest that students are more likely to draw comparisons with “Robin Hood”.

This is interesting to me as it seems to suggest something I'm slowly coming to realize: In a world where many are simply pulled along for the ride, piracy is for an honest consumer one of the most powerful ways of protesting in the realm of digital media: You can have your cake and eat it too - abstaining from funding things you disagree with while still being able to get hold of material needed for your education or media that might even be required to stay relevant in your social circles.

In short, for some ideologies it is a very powerful and disruptive tool. It does however assume pirates are mostly people with good intentions. I would love to know more about the distributions of why people actually pirate.

Yet to meet anyone who could have bought a full fat commercial Autocad or Solidworks license as a 13yo kid. Even more so 20 years ago.

If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

Doubt anyone would be put into jail for doing that. At worst if done maliciously then they might be asked to leave or trespassed.

Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

libgen is the modern library of alexandria. and it is free as in beer. thank you russians

That is the point. A legal time limited monopoly. But it has to be time limited or progress is stalled. Five years is plenty of lead time to be remain ahead of competition.

That world we life in sure feels innovative ..not. 1 new thing per day,with 8 billion humans alive and connected. The web promising the new edison or tesla, meanwhile those two lifed in a time of mass book copying without repercussions. Copyright is toxic, extractive landlording , mining innovationspaces with penalties and bureaucracies. Its deeply anti-libertarian on an individual level.

People should be allowed to violate copyright all they want, but if they create something comercial the "inspiring work" as derived from the consumption history should get a kickback.

> If unauthorized copying is akin to preventing a potential sale then using a gym for an authorized/non paid amount of time to try the gym without paying is not stealing.

Well using a gym for free isn’t stealing either. Although the analogy is flawed because a gym has a limited capacity so you could take up the space of legitimate customers, which you don’t do when torrenting copyrighted stuff.

> Creator of the thing sets the terms. People have the ability to not buy it if they do not like the terms. But they do not have the right to alter the terms via stealing.

No, creators can’t just redefine words. It’s not stealing, because you’re not taking something away from someone.

If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products).

Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job.

I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.

Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.