Z-Library has become the go-to site for many readers in recent years by providing access to millions of books, for free.
The site’s continued ability to do so was put to the test late last year when U.S. law enforcement seized over 200 domain names connected to the site. Two alleged Z-Library operators were arrested as part of a criminal investigation.
Z-Library Comeback
Despite losing two alleged members of its team, as well as over 200 domain names, Z-Library had no intention of throwing in the towel. The site remained accessible through the dark web and a few weeks ago made a full comeback on the clearnet as well.
The new setup comes with some technical tweaks. For example, every user now has a unique subdomain to access Z-Library, which may make it more difficult for law enforcement to take down the whole operation all at once.
Implementing these changes and some others, including a new recommendation section and Telegram bot, required substantial investments. To help pay the bill, Z-Library is now asking its users to chip in.
Substantial Damage
In a message posted earlier this month, the Z-Library team revealed that the U.S. law enforcement actions caused substantial damage. While the 220 terabytes of data weren’t lost, getting everything up and running again wasn’t easy.
“[A]lmost all public domains of the library were blocked in November 2022 by order of the US Secret Service. The inner infrastructure of the project suffered some substantial damage too,” Z-Library said.
“Today, we are still under unprecedented pressure. At the moment, Z-Library is going through the hardest times in all the 14 years of its existence. The library might work with interruptions, and we ask you to be patient.”
Donation Drive
These comments are part of a donation drive encouraging users to contribute. Z-Library offers a variety of support options, including crypto, gift cards, WeChat, and Alipay.
“We will be extremely thankful for every dollar that will be donated,” Zlibrary notes.
These types of requests are nothing new for pirate sites. In most cases, however, the donation amounts fail to impress, presumably because the audience prefers to spend its money elsewhere. With Z-Library, the situation appears somewhat different.
Tens of Thousands, Per Day?
The donation window opened on March 15 and, based on the public numbers we’ve seen, tens of thousands of dollars have come in so far. The 74 top contributions of $100 and up are already good for $9,802.
That number is just a fraction of the total, however. After keeping score for half an hour, we counted 90 donations totaling $928. Repeating this on a different day resulted in nearly the same result; 93 donations and $916.
Those numbers are good for an average of over 4,000 daily donations, and $40,000. That figure has to be multiplied by 14 to determine the amount donated over two weeks.
We can’t confirm the accuracy of the reported figures but if these are legit, it must be one of the most successful pirate site donation drives in history.
This isn’t the first time that Z-Library has asked for donations. In fact, earlier requests for contributions helped U.S. law enforcement identify and arrest two Z-Library suspects.
Follow-The-Money
According to public court filings, Amazon gift cards and associated Gmail addresses helped the authorities to identify two alleged operators who spent part of the donations on clothes and beauty products.
The remaining operators must be aware of that so presumably the current donation drive has been set up to avoid a similar fate.
If the reported donation numbers are indeed correct, the pirate library should have sufficient funds to keep the site afloat for a while, as long as the authorities don’t intervene again.
At the time of writing, the status of the extradition proceeding of the two arrested Z-Library suspects is unclear. TorrentFreak reached out to their attorney in the U.S. criminal case who didn’t provide any further detail.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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