“Most notorious” illegal shadow library sued by textbook publishers | Ars Technica

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.

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.