Library.nu

» see library.nu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

an imported engineering textbook in turkey is priced in a foreign currency and sold in a country earning in lira. that arithmetic has never improved. it is the reason a certain kind of photocopy shop existed next to every university here, and the reason the campus copier ran hot in the week before an exam.

library.nu was that arrangement moved online and scaled to the entire planet. it held around four hundred thousand books by the count in its own takedown notice, and reports at the time went as high as a million. the collection was not novels. it was monographs and technical manuals, the graduate reading lists of a dozen disciplines. the writer who examined it most carefully after it closed described its users as students and scholars in latin america, china, eastern europe, africa and india, a global middle class with degrees and no hard currency.

the site had been alive since 2004 under other names. it started as ebooksclub.org, became gigapedia in 2007 when most people first heard of it, and took the library.nu address in 2010. the site itself mostly held the index. the actual files sat on a file host called ifile.it, which is the arrangement that eventually gave the publishers two targets instead of one.

on 15 february 2012 a munich court issued the order. seventeen academic publishers led by john wiley and sons had gone after both halves at once. the administrators closed the site, and by the twentieth the.nu registry had revoked the domain. for a few days in between it pointed at google books, which somebody clearly enjoyed arranging.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually held ~

the difference between this and the music sites of the same era is what was being copied. a scholarly monograph has a print run in the hundreds and a price built on the assumption that libraries, not readers, do the buying. the author is not paid a royalty worth counting and in many cases wants the thing read more than sold.

so the injured party in the case was a distribution business rather than a group of writers, which is why the publishers won the legal argument and lost the public one comprehensively. their own statements put the library at four hundred thousand titles. nobody involved seemed eager to say how many of those were reachable any other way from lagos or lahore.

~ how they found them ~

the operators were never publicly named. investigators reportedly believed they were irish, possibly working out of galway, on a server in kyiv, which is a supply chain assembled specifically so no single country's police could act alone.

what undid them was the money. the site carried advertising and accepted donations, and it was through the donation trail that the people behind it were identified. pirates also have paypal accounts, as one account of the case put it. every version of this story since has the same shape: the hosting can be hardened indefinitely, the payments cannot.

~ where the books went ~

the collection did not die on 15 february. russian shadow librarians had been mirroring it for months before the injunction landed, and library genesis absorbed the bulk of it across 2011 and 2012. by 2014 libgen was listing 1.2 million records, comfortably more than library.nu ever held.

which makes this an unusual grave. the product was killed and its inventory walked out the back door intact, into a successor with no company attached and no payment trail to subpoena. the publishers removed the address. the shelf is still standing, somewhere else, larger every year.

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