Month: April 2023

With more than 12 million books in its archive, Z-Library advertised itself as the largest repository of pirated books on the Internet.

The site has millions of regular readers who find a wealth of free knowledge and entertainment at their fingertips.

This success was briefly interrupted late last year when the U.S. Government seized the site’s main domain names. The enforcement action also led to the arrest of two alleged Russian operators of the site, who now find themselves at the center of a criminal investigation.

A crackdown of this magnitude usually marks the end of a pirate site, but Z-Library appears to be going in the opposite direction. The site has made a full comeback with a more ‘censorship-resistant’ setup and recently collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations.

Next Up: Sharing Paper Books

In a new message, posted this week, Z-Library thanks its userbase for their generous contributions, noting that it secured all the necessary funds to ensure continued development. Apparently, this includes support for offline sharing.

In addition to offering millions of ebooks, Z-Library says that it’s working on a new service that will help users to share physical copies with each other.

“Books you have read should not gather dust on your shelf – instead, they can get a second life in the hands of new readers! This helps to preserve the literary heritage and spread the knowledge and ideas contained in books to more people,” they write.

Z-Points

The book lending concept, commonly known as a library, is a few hundred years old already, but Z-Library will upgrade both scale and reach. The idea is to create a global market with dedicated pick-up points for user-donated books.

“[W]e want to organize ‘Z-Points’ – collection and storage points for books that will be the link between those who share their books and those who need them.

“Book owners who are willing to share them with other users can send books to the nearest Z-Point in their region. And those who need books stored in these points will be able to receive them for their use.”

This sounds like a P2P competitor for traditional libraries. Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points. People can also volunteer to run a Z-Point from their own homes.

Running a book lending point will require quite a bit of storage space and organizational effort so fulfillment centers and third-party logistics services are also welcome to join in.

By Users, For Users

The Z-Point idea is still in the planning phase. According to Z-Library, users will be able to send books by mail. These can then be loaned by others and/or sent by mail when requested.

This proposal is quite different from the traditional pirate ebook library Z-Library offers now. And loaning a book to someone is generally not seen as copyright infringement either unless it’s a copied ebook.

Whether there’s a market for this plan and if it will ever come to fruition has yet to be seen, but based on the comments we’ve read so far, plenty of people seem to like it. Soon after the announcement was made public, hundreds of enthusiastic responses started rolling in.

If anything, it shows the global scale of the site, with people suggesting Vietnam, Brazil, Portugal, Colombia, Iran, Uzbekistan, Nigeria, Spain India, Argentina, Egypt, France, Ethiopia, China, and Ghana as ideal Z-Point locations.

Questions and Suggestions

The announcement was posted several days after April 1st, so it appears to be serious. That said, there are plenty of questions that remain unanswered. What are the legal implications, for example, and who covers the costs?

“The idea is good but like how would you deal with the logistics and also with cost? Especially when the team is facing legal pursuit how can you hide your identities and do it?[sic]” one commenter writes.

Other commenters pointed out that, in many countries, people already organize free libraries to collect and donate books to local communities. Some of these are organized and promoted through the “Little Free Library” project.

The Z-Library team says that it welcomes comments and suggestions. For now, there are no concrete plans, but a seed has been planted.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Enlarge / Klaus Teuber, in 2015 at a games festival in Essen, Germany. Teuber created The Settlers of Catan (later just Catan), along with other award-winning board games. (credit: Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

I was in my early 30s when I first played The Settlers of Catan. I had been at a bar with a small group one freezing winter night in 2012 in Buffalo, New York. One of us, eager to share his recent obsession, declared it was time for the outing's next stage. We went to his barely unpacked new apartment nearby. He pulled the game from a plastic tote, opened it on a wobbly dinette table, and laid out the board, apologizing for the moisture-warped edges. I took a picture (on my HTC Thunderbolt) because, having had a few, I wanted to ensure I'd remember this game with the wooden pieces and weird amount of sheep.

Settlers of Catan, as I saw it in early 2012. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

It was an inauspicious start to the rest of my board gaming life. Growing up in the '80s and '90s, then starting my young adult life in the early 2000s, I'd regarded board games as something you do in situations where you can't do anything else: power outages, cabins in the woods, gatherings with people without known shared interests. They weren't really going to be fun, and you wouldn't necessarily play them, but someone would get to be the winner, and time would pass. Catan changed that—for me and for what are now legions of modern board game enthusiasts.

From a German basement to 32 million copies

You may have seen the news this week that Klaus Teuber, the German designer who created The Settlers of Catan (now just Catan), died on April 1 at age 70. Teuber developed Die Siedler von Catan in the early 1990s, playing with ideas of Icelandic settlements, tinkering in his basement while working full-time at a dental lab. He'd bring up new iterations for his wife and kids to test every weekend, he told The New Yorker. The breakthrough, he said, was using hexagonal tiles instead of squares.

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