I got burned buying a trilogy with a good rating on goodreads. I only read the first 1.5 books and didn't bother after that.
It sucked and when I looked again later it had a more relevant rating. I think the initial score was gamed by bots.
So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it, which I've done most recently for Children of Time.
Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.
Children of Time is wonderful! I wish Adrian Tchaikovsky would stop churning them out so quickly and write some more of the quality of Children of Time.
Piracy of anything other than live streams of La Liga games... For those, Spain shuts down whole IP ranges and cripples the Internet at large while the game is live.
That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression.
In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew.
To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).
There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.
I think it’s even crazier that a visible slice of the address space that is supposed to last for the rest of humanity’s future has already been allocated.
It's 1/8 of that space and it's being allocated in big blocks that are expected not to run out unless humanity expands to the whole solar system. If it does run out, there are 7 tries left. More if you only use half as much space next time.
One problem I see with annas archive is that there is a tendency towards older books. Now I do understand this for many reasons, but ... I recently read a book about steel construction in 1932, just for curiousity. I wanted to find a more recent one - did not even have to be, say, 1990 or 2000 or some such, but I simply could not find any (well, perhaps english speaking, but this is also a problem in that non-english languages are VERY underpresented in general).
I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.
There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen.
You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to
Happy to answer questions as always :)
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