Information WANTS to be free. I dearly want to get my soapbox out, but I have to hold myself to a higher standard now *sigh*
Thanks for the onion link Mayko
[Edited on 12-9-2022 by arkoma]solo - 16-11-2023 at 11:08
....unfortunately both the tor version as the regular version are now pay sites. no more free books and their journal articles are never found....i
guess they want payment for that too....sad!...soloKeras - 17-11-2023 at 00:42
The files have not been deleted. The servers are (supposedly) located in Russia. Only the domain name is, but that avail almost to nothing. It’s
just another case of the FBI boasting a non-achievement. EF2000 - 19-11-2023 at 04:23
The files have not been deleted. The servers are (supposedly) located in Russia. Only the domain name is, but that avail almost to nothing. It’s
just another case of the FBI boasting a non-achievement.
US government, as usual, is just a paper tiger. They can do nothing to the servers, so they resort to defacing a website, very grown up behaviour.
Servers are all across the world: Russia, Panama, Germany, Finland, Malaysia, Luxembourg, even USA. HQ is somewhere in the land of green tea and
pandas, safe from imperialists' reach.
Why not switch to using library genesis or sci hub then?
And is there a 1:1 backup of z-lib? How big is it? teodor - 10-2-2026 at 08:45
Zlib is an extention of the library genesis. The full copy of library genesis is 82 Tb, but not everything is chemistry of course. Zlib contains even
less chemistry and technical books being a mix of fiction/non fiction books, the size of the full collection (excluding the core genesis corpus) is 77
Tb. SciHub is 90Tb but mostly contains magazines (not only about chemistry of course). There is also several chinese archives containing english
chemistry books (like duxiu) and IFS distributed NexusSTC (76TBs, it is a technical book library containing also articles like SciHub). Everything
except NexusSTC is available on torrents and could be backed up if you have enough space and no legal issues to download those torrents. Searching of
the books in all those collections is not easy but Annas Archive did the excelent work of indexing and dedublication as much as possible providing 3
DBs for search: one MariaDB and 2 Elastic Search DBs (one for books and one for articles). The size of those databases is also huge but it is the best
tool for electronic books search we probably have today (also they included WorldCAT into their index and for this reason they have sue to remove this
data, but as for today it is still available, both as working site and as a torrent backup of the full DB).
In most countries distribution or (on a lesser extent) possession of those libraries are illegal, so check your local law and legal practice to
understand the real risks.
As for chemical books, I am maintaining a good collection myself, mostly in a paper form but some electronic books or magazines are also available
(with my own index and OCR). For me my own library is more convenient because there is no need to store books which I have no interest to. You can
send me U2U query, may be I will be able to help in case you can't find something, who knows. MrDoctor - 10-2-2026 at 16:29
when i did my machine vision class, we learned about C functions and AI computer vision techniques from textbooks published in the 1970s
youd be surprised just how relevant and useful really old textbooks can be, and libraries like these are the final safe haven for a lot of them. like
i dont even know if you can access chemical abstracts pre 1920 or something, the ACS website i dont think even has paid access to it, you are kind of
at the whims of any really old or independent local state libraries collection who had the original and bothered to digitize it themselves.
i absolutely hate when i read something that was refferenced from JACS, JOC, or any chemistry society really, because half the time i couldnt pay to
see it if i wanted to, short of buying a 50-year volume set, or just 1-2 specific pages where i dont even get to see the abstract, just a title. But
it always seems like the people profiting off the access arent even the original publishers anymore, just 3rd party entities.teodor - 11-2-2026 at 01:59
Yes, this is how it is. The part of accumulated knowledge is in a hardly accessible form. Not everything was even scanned (e.g. most russian chemical
journals were not). Not everything was OCRed. Also only a part of publication is in English. There is no common index for international publications.
Many publications are behind paywall. And shadow libraries are fighting for survival. The storage crysis (raising prices for HDD and SDD) put all that
shadow ecosystem in the dangerous state.
We (as a society) can expect the possibility of loosing what we have.
Add to this the raising AI popularity and the process of replacing the real articles with AI generated over the time. If we can talk about knowledge
crysis we are at the beginning of it. How you can distinguish between the real article from 1923 and the AI generated fake of some unexisting journal?
There are many challenges of knowledge preservation indeed. And I think it is too risky to delegate the whole process to official institutions only.
Any of them can be bankrupt or some activity could be out of their commercial interests (like scanning of those old ACS abstracts McDoctor mentioned).
I think the knowledge preservation could be also the task of an amateur scientific society.
