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.
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.
Thank you so much
Thats huge
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.
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!
