Digital librarianship—the digitization, collection, and cataloguing of texts—was one of the earliest uses of networked computers. By most accounts, the first digital library was Project Gutenberg, which began making public domain works available in 1971 via the Arpanet, the ...
  • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    14·
    22 hours ago

    In-depth article about how shadow library sites like LibGen came to be and why they matter.

    Breaks down the history and shows how helpful LibGen is for regular folks and us amateur scientists who just want to learn without hitting paywalls.

  • sqgl@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    Surprisingly edited by MIT press. It was the MIT police which referred Aaron Swartz to federal prosecutors for piracy. He was hounded to death.

  • SK@utsukta.org
    7·
    23 hours ago

    Here’s what I see as a consequence of free educational book distribution: within decades, generations of people everywhere in the world will grow up with access to the best scientific texts of all time. […] [T]he quality and accessibility of education to the poor will grow dramatically too. Frankly, I see this as the only way to naturally improve mankind: we need to make all the information available to them at any time.—Anonymous administrator of the Russian shadow library site Library Genesis (LG), explaining its raison d’être

    Free flow of knowledge is absolutely essential. Of all the things that should be accessible knowledge and the opportunity for every person to realize their full potential should be a must.

    • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      7·
      23 hours ago

      Free flow of knowledge is absolutely essential. Of all the things that should be accessible knowledge and the opportunity for every person to realize their full potential should be a must.

      I totally agree. I often think about self-taught scientists like Michael Faraday or Mary Anning and what they’d say about how hard it is to access knowledge today, even with all the tech we have. Back in the 1800s, they had to hunt down books, write letters to experts, and dig through whatever scraps of info they could find. Now we’ve got the internet, but somehow it’s still locked behind paywalls and profiteers trying to gatekeep learning.

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
        2·
        18 hours ago

        It contains every combination of the english alphabet characters possible.

        So you can find a lot of junk, but also everything that has ever been said or written and everything that ever will be said or written in the future.

        It may be disjointed, but it’s there, every passage of every book.

        And everything has it’s special place that always stays the same. The way it is generated and searchable is really interesting.

        If you go to that hexagon, that wall, that shelf, that book and that page - you will find your own comment. (And you will also find it in millions of other pages surrounded by different variations of characters).

        You might click around randomly and find every passage from the bible. But also every passage from the bible where the word “Jesus” is replaced with your own name… etc. there are only finite possibilities of combinations of characters.

        Hope that makes sense.

        • sheepishly@fedia.io
          2·
          38 minutes ago

          Love that site. Just now I clicked on a random page and got something with “robux” in the top line, kek

        • Universal Monk@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          2·
          18 hours ago

          Thank you. I just finished up researching it since I didn’t now what it was. And I never heard of the project before, so very cool little thought experiment!

          Caution: Don’t put in your date of death. I did. I typed in “The date of <UniveralMonk’s> death is” and then took the gibberish word that was after that and put into ai to turn it into a date using numbers of alphabet, etc.

          My death is set for May 10, 2025.

          I was very unhappy with this knowledge. Then realized that every possible variation of the wrong date (include every single date in the world ever) would be listed as well as a correct one. So whew! (I hope!)