michiganderOne of the most important websites on the internet. This is how my relationship with free books online evolved over time: 2011-2016 (middle school through high school): Whatever I could scrounge up from blogs that had random pdfs, google ebook previews of entire texts, and our own digital library access through (I think) World Book Online. Somewhere during this time I became aware of SciHub because I read some articles about it. I even used it a couple times to get doi articles, which was an exciting proof of concept. Through SciHub I discovered LibGen. 2016-17 (Beginning of College): The Library Genesis/LibGen heyday. After becoming conscious as a poor college student who needed textbooks I learned that you can actually find scummy pdf sites around the internet. LibGen was the holy grail. During my first semester of university I pirated a somewhat obscure text from Saint Bonaventure and shared it with my entire class. Everyone was thrilled. My professor told me I was stealing from the monks who translated it. I experienced some disquiet at the notion, but I was never poorer than my first year at college. At one point one of my only pairs of shoes broke and instead of getting new shoes I managed to purchase shoe glue from amazon to put them back together. It was during this time that I started to acquaint myself more intimately with sailing the seven seas. I had always considered myself an internet fiend and prided myself on showing people the dark web in high school (you literally just have to download tor, but it felt mysterious). It was at this time that I realized The WayBack Machine also offered other things, like book pdfs. If I recall correctly, not every LibGen mirror was controlled by the same host and some had books that others did not, so I also got into a rhythm of figuring out what had what. 2018-2019: LibGen started to get a little unreliable at times. Mirrors would go down, some seemed to be fakes. This was when I found Z-Library. It seemed like it had everything and more. I bounced between the two a lot and I couldn't figure out which database came first. It was sort of like trying to date the Synoptic Gospels. They have a lot of shared content, but they also have some content that is unique to themselves and it's all jumbled enough to make it difficult to parse what's better for what. Zlib was so easy though. It felt like the search and downloads were simplified. I found myself seeing more versions of books than I had previously found. I created an account there. I even got Calibri and uploaded a couple texts (to LibGen which eventually came to Zlib iirc). 2019-2022: The Dark Ages. Z-Library took a series of difficult hits and everyone had to get a lot more inventive about how they were finding books. At one point Zlib was hacked and the login page was a hacker honeypot. Obviously, I did not use any shared credentials with any other website, but I was still stupid enough to login to fake Zlib while it was down on the clearnet and attempt to download texts only to realize my login details had been stolen. Alas. During this time you had to get on Tor to download Zlib books which took FOREVER or you'd have to do their Telegram dm service which added so many hurdles to getting the download. At this time SciHub had had major takedowns, LibGen was constantly struggling, and eventually Zlib took a massive hit from various world governments. The era of free information seemed like it was coming to a close. There had been a time where I had created theological booklists on Zlib and people had actually used them for their own enrichment. My first years at grad school were very difficult when it came to finding research and reading texts. 2022-2024: THE ANNAS ARCHIVE RENAISSANCE. You would not believe the INSANE dopamine hit that came in 2022 when I navigated to AA for the first time, saw a simple site had combined every major online PDF library together, searched for a text, and then immediately downloaded it onto my computer in seconds. It was just unbelievable. There was zero bloat, it was extremely easy to search for the texts I wanted, and I no longer had to walk across campus to the library to get the majority of what I was searching for. At some point in the last decade someone had digitized Candler Seminary's library and here on AA I could download it with a rapidity I had never experienced before. It was mind melting. I AA so much for everything I've learned in the last four years. To be sure, it's still missing a ton of highly technical and scholarly work, but it's got an insane amount of obscure work that I would never expect to be on there. 2025-Present: Compute costs have gone through the roof. Anna's Archive has attempted to hawk it's files for LLM training, and I have no doubt that all the major AI companies have partaken. They have also throttled download speeds. Nowadays when I'm undergoing a new project I need to tumble up some crypto so I can download books from the 1800's
No comments yet
Sign in to comment.