And so they resort to sites like this and really depend on them to be able to do basic research.” These are people who are like, trying to do research in countries all around the world, and they can’t afford the, you know, million-dollar subscription fees that some of these major publishers charge.

“And people who are using these sites are not like criminals. “The system is such that it’s maximizing profit over access for the benefit of society,” he added. Recent findings suggest that researchers are more reliant on shadow libraries when they’re located in countries where universities lack the resources to pay for bulk subscriptions to scholarly articles. Earlier this year, BookTok users drew attention to a loophole in Amazon’s e-book return policy that many independent authors found exploitative and to be hurting their bottom line, ultimately leading to Amazon changing its policy to close the loophole. It wouldn’t be the first time TikTok users offered life hacks for information access that are morally questionable in most instances. “The hashtag #zlibrary on popular social media platform TikTok has 19 million views, in reference to the countless videos posted by college and high school students and others across the world promoting it as the go-to place for free ebooks,” the Authors Guild wrote in a complaint to the Office of U.S. However, the seizure comes shortly after authors and publishers began to call out TikTok for giving torrenters a platform to publicize their book piracy hacks. The FBI’s New York press office declined to comment. The sites enabled access to otherwise paywalled content including more than 11 million books and over 80 million articles. Z-Library was a shadow library project that offered file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts, and trade books.

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