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Seems like from the article a good chunk of the traffic is from students who don’t want to be taken advantage of by predatory publishing companies who’ve jacked up their textbook prices… won’t somebody think of the poor companies.
Yeah, constantly calling it the “Most notorious” illegal shadow library won’t make it not be the best resource students and teachers and book writers themselves have against the predatory and greedy behavior of publishers.
I finished my thesis theoretical part thanks to Libgen. My uni didn’t have all the accesses I required to journals etc. even my own professors told us to sail the high seas to get their own papers since they didn’t earn anything by publishing in journals and the prices were stupid
My thoughts exactly.
The ideal solution here is to get courses and professors to switch away from the predatory publishing companies to other open/accessible options.
We have a page on the wiki about it, but haven’t gotten around to collecting more data for it: https://ubcwiki.ca/academics/classes/textbooks.html
Hopefully in the next week or so, depending on whoever gets time for it
Oh man I hope libgen stays up. It would have taken me another two years to get through grad school if I had had to go to the damned library and manually search through all the books that I was able to find and search in seconds using libgen.
The publishers can get fucked.
Show me a commercial service that is even 1/10 as useful in academia as the illegal shadow library.
Pearson, McGraw-Hill etc. have stupid restrictions on how, where and when you can read their books. On their online platforms they have vastly more control than a print version of a text. And they along with other publishers like Springer, use their control of the market to charge learners and educational institutions out the nose to line their own pockets.
Personally I’d prefer the illegal shadow library over the legal textbook extortionists.
