I just want to share this resource in case people didn’t know it. It describes itself as the world’s largest open-source open-data library. And Includes Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and more.
Anna’s Archive is great. Finding this was a silver lining to the Zlib shutdown. I have it installed to the home screen on my android eink reader and its pretty seamless.
What android eink reader do you have?
Also curious about this
alternatively does anyone have any recommendations for such a device if OP doesn’t respond? I’ve been missing e-ink since my kindle got destroyed several years ago
I just use my Kindle and convert/import the books with Calibre.
I’ll second Kobo. I replaced my lost kindle with a Kobo Clara 2E and really like it. I think they have an android device, too
I like my Kobo Libra H2O.
I’ve got an Onyx Boox Leaf2. Pretty happy with it, it’s pricier than a kobo or similar, but not too bad.
I was wondering if it was Onyx. I’ve looked at those and considered them to replace my old Nook…and then the more recent Nooks went on sale.
How long does your battery last on it?
I couldn’t tell you exactly because I generally plug it in when I’m done with it. It’s not as long as my old Kobo Nia, which would last weeks. A 3 hour reading session it’ll generally drop 10-15%, so I reckon you could probably get a week with daily use. That’s with the backlight off but with wifi and bluetooth enabled, you could probably stretch it longer with airplane mode.
Zlib shutting down was like the modern equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but for piracy.
The burning of the library of alexandria causing a loss of a ton of knowledge is basically just a modern meme. Well it has been a bit of a myth for a few centuries but Carl Sagan popularised it in Cosmos and he was quite wrong
There were a ton of libraries all around the classical world, basically every town had one. Alexandria was one of the biggest and most prestigious but you had other huge libraries as well such as the Library of Pergamon which rivalled Alexandria. Also book/scroll collecting was quite popular amongst the upper classes so there would’ve been tons of personal libraries around. Granted they weren’t on the scale of alexandria but when you have libraries in every town, personal collections and then some big libraries that matched Alexandria, not much at all would’ve been unique to just alexandria so there wasn’t much knowledge lost at all, if any.
Plus there’s the fact that there wasn’t even a single ‘burning of alexandria’, there were multiple events over it’s history. There was the big fire with Caesar and it’s agreed a ton of stuff was burnt but they restocked with copies from other libraries and carried on. There’s records of it still in operation in the 3rd century. But before all that the library had been in decline for at least a hundred years anyway as the later Ptolemies didn’t bother providing adequate funding and the library was mismanaged for quite a while with the position of head librarian becoming quite politicised.
What caused the loss of a ton of classical works is the fact that papyrus is pretty shit for preservation as outside of the most dry and arid places it’ll just rot away to after 50-100 years in most conditions.
What classical writings we do have that survives is mostly the result of whatever shit people in medieval times thought was worth copying and recopying over the centuries, recovering palimpsests and the rare actual preserved papyrus finds such as the library of scrolls preserved in Herculaneum. And what we’ve lost is down to two millennia of entropy rather than caesar or Christians burning down a library.
I know about it. It was just a joke. But good write up
Oh right, lol. Sorry for the big post then. I’m autistic and some things go completely over my head. I’m also prone to rambling on a lot as you might have noticed.
No need to apologize for it!
Really interesting! I had a vague idea of the truth of it, any chance you have a source or reccomendation on where to learn more about it?
Well I got most of that from reading the Askhistorians subreddit over the years. Dunno if you know about it but it’s a heavily moderated board where the answers have to be in depth and represent recent academical standards. Tons of good shit there. I hope they migrate over to lemmy or kbin soon, I don’t really feel like searching for posts that cover the library there but you should be able to find them easily.
I have a copy of an out of print book that is not available to purchase anymore. No digital versions of the book exist though copyright might still apply to it since it is not very old. I wish to scan and host it somewhere like this so it comes in useful to someone, someday. How do I go about donating a scanned copy of the book to a library like this? Last time i scanned a rare comic and put it on my blog, it ended up getting copied by sites that host comics and they put their own watermark and ads on each page which made me sad. Doubly so when my blog got nuked and the original scan is not available online anymore. I don’t want that to happen again.
What I do is upload to Library Genesis. You can do it anonymously by logging in with “guest” (I think) as both username and password
Yeah I uploaded a textbook before to Sci-Hub and lib genesis. Feels good when I can’t find a textbook but can get it uploaded to give back to the community.
Will try it out, thanks!
Not sure about this site specifivally, but my preferred way of getting my scanned books ‘out there’ is through myanonamouse.net they are a private community of bookworms and after you host your book there other public sites will pick it up asap. A private torrenting community is the safest way to share something that MIGHT be copyrighted, let the ones that share it publicly worry about the rest.
@nobloat as a librarian i approve of this message
As an avid reader: hear hear!
Only self-hosted, only hardcore Rats on The Boat - BitTorrent search engine https://github.com/DEgITx/rats-search
This looks really interesting, it could use its own post.
Thank you for sharing it! I had no clue that such an archive existed.
Yup this site is pure gold, I can easily find also non English ebooks on Anna’s Archive!
Isn’t Anna’s archive a backup if Zlib?
Edit: apparently it’s way more than that
I’ve found books that were not in libgen nor zlib so it is more than that.
Anna’s Archive is great, I’ve found the textbook for every college course I’ve taken using that site.
Wow, this is fucking amazing. Thanks for this!
Thank you so much
Thats huge
On a similar note: For well-crafted ebooks in the public domain, I cannot recommend Standard Ebooks enough!
Yep, It’s usually my go-to when I want to read some books :) I didn’t know it also contained Sci-Hub so that’s good to know of I ever want to do some scientific research!