A little slow off the mark here, but library.nu was recently taken down:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html
(Its old domain names--ebooksclub.org and gigapedia.com--redirect to this article)
It was a fantastic website that hosted hundreds of thousands of high-quality textbooks. Given the paywalls and high markup of academic content, this is a pretty huge blow to students and NEETs alike.
How do you guys feel about this? I am actually very upset. It's like a modern burning of the Library of Alexandria.
This makes me rather furious. However I still have hope for the remaining repositories - ebookee.net and freebookspot.es for instance.
Nobody can keep college professors and professional textbook writers from putting out a new edition every semester with one word changed so that the students have to pay 100 dollars more. Fuck these guys.
I attended college somewhere overseas, and over there, nobody gives a shit about copyright. Everyone with any brains goes to get their textbooks at the copy shop for one tenth the price. Sure, there might be some pages missing, but it's better than buying the full price book.
> Everyone with any brains goes to get their textbooks at the copy shop for one tenth the price. Sure, there might be some pages missing, but it's better than buying the full price book.
I like that. It sounds fun.
When I was at university I just used the library for everything, so actually buying textbooks was never an issue for me. This just made me think it's more unfair though. Universities can afford the high prices for books anyway, so it really is just the students and hobbyists who suffer.
I'm saddened they shut this resource down. But one day maybe the laws can be altered to allow the freedom of literary information.
I'd never even heard of it until after it was taken down.
Do you guys think these sort of sites are fair?
Of course, textbooks are extortionate and knowledge should be free. But is "pirating" John A. Author's monograph on mathematics published by Foo Publications all that ethical?
>>9
I see what you mean, and I think I might agree with it.
Information, skill teaching, reference books. Maybe pirating those is okay. But I'd rather not pirate a work of fiction that an author put his feelings and heart and above all, hard work, into.
Is there some form of a replacement up?
>>11
Only Ebookee and random Blogspot pages come to mind. I suppose there are IRC channels too.
They all lack the organization and metadata of library.nu, though. It was really one of a kind.
>>12
IRC Channels? Not to sound useless, but what ones?
I'm going to college soon and they want me to get over 300 USD in programming books.
>>9
Fundamental misunderstanding of the business. Academic monographs aren't marketed to people, they're marketed to university libraries which are compelled to buy them at whatever price in order to maintain their function as a research library. Academics are compelled to publish articles in prestigious (read: owned by one of the main academic publishing companies and not open access) journals and monographs via the same thanks to an archaic system of determining their worth as academics. No one likes this arrangement but the publishers, who are free to take advantage of the duress of the buyers and sellers to rake in the big bucks. Look at the recent dust up between Elsevier and several academic mathematics communities.
>>14
True. And with digital distribution of ebooks and scientific articles, the gloves are off at this point.
I have no problem with piracy and I don't consider it stealing. But I'd admittedly feel guilty if I downloaded, say, The Art of Computer Programming rather than buying it and supporting decades of hard work (even if most of the money ends up in the pocket of some rich publishing executive).
Plus, I just like having physical books. I really wish public libraries paid the same attention to textbooks as academic libraries do.
legalreads.com has millions of ebooks and is a good alternative to LNU