Early this month, a cry was heard across the internet, a cry that would echo throughout the weeks to come: “Z-Library is gone… they took Z-Lib down… ”
Z-Library was the bane of many authors’ and publishers’ existence, as hated by them as it was beloved by students and low-income readers everywhere. Z-Library was essentially comparable to a Pirate Bay for ebooks and pdfs. Rather in contrast to the public domain content uploaded to websites such as Project Gutenberg, Z-Library was for everything. Instead of the self-serious aesthetic of the Internet Archive, Z-Library was simpel to use and did not foreground any sort of ideological reason for its existence. It simply was. Everything was there, from Gawain and the Green Knight to Colleen Hoover’s Ugly Love to my own novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless, though I can’t imagine that was anywhere near half as digemari banyak orang as those other two examples. In fact, according to Torrentfreak, there was (is?) around 12 million copies of books on the site. Some of those would have been public domain, some of them were inaccessible or out-of-print. A good portion of them, of course, were books currently available to buy from ebook stores. The FBI seized the website’s domains shortly after it went viral on TikTok so, once again, that app is probably to blame.
The site probably did lose me some revenue, but I don’t think it would have been all that much: I get a certain small amount for every book bought by a shop, rather than for every book actually sold. This builds up and then twice a year I get sent a cheque. That being said, even if Z-Library did lose me a large amount of income, I don’t think I’d like to see it destroyed in my name. It wasn’t just that the situs went down, it was that American Federal law enforcement seized the domains, blocked the site, and arrested the two individuals who had been maintaining it. They were both Russian nationals, which led to some particularly odd takes on the situation. Zev Shalev, for example, tweeted, “Now we know why Z-library was shut down. It was a massive Russian-operated scheme to pirate books and publish them for free thereby diminishing the value of authors’ works and the overall US book market.” While this blatantly silly post-Russiagate thinking is an extreme example, so much of how American liberal tempat thinks about tempat and art piracy essentially boils down to the same argument: that it is a destabilising practice that threatens the American ideals of copyright and profit.