An alternative is plain old school irc. I'm not kidding.
Connect to irc.irchighway.net then /j #ebooks then !search <author and/or title>
Receive search results via xdcc which gives you the commands to download that stuff.
Or query one of the bots (e. g. @bsk) and get a list of hundreds of thousands of books that are available and search that for what you want.

I prefer that over ad infested one click hosters with countdowns, link shortener cascades and captchas. I find and get the stuff much faster by using irc.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

it's pretty cool that folks are still doing it that way. maybe I'll make an account and suck some dicks

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't #ebooks basically just mirror Libgen?

Among the major book downloading websites, only libgen.li has ads, and only Anna's Archive has a countdown.

[–] obbeel@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 1 day ago

#ebooks is composed of datahoarders that have a lot of stuff available. You declare the data source you're getting the book from (e.g. Oatmeal) and then the name of the book.

[–] Krik@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure if #ebooks mirrors Libgen. I wouldn't be surprised if they copy from each other.

I have allergies against ads, countdowns, etc. The interweb is polluted with that stuff and so are most piracy sites.

I find irc to be much easier to use than the alternatives. Just a click to start hexchat and then it auto-connects to the right server and auto-joins the right channel. All within seconds. I even get my animes from irc like I did in 2005. 😁

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I’m not sure if #ebooks mirrors Libgen. I wouldn’t be surprised if they copy from each other.

It is unclear to me what's the method to upload to #ebooks. I've uploaded some obscure books to Libgen in the past, so I checked whether they're available on #ebooks, and they're not. So... they don't mirror each other. I checked both UnderNet and IRCHighway, and the latter even directed me to these websites in case I'm looking for textbooks. It doesn't seem like an adequate replacement for LG, at least for my purposes.

I have allergies against ads, countdowns, etc. The interweb is polluted with that stuff and so are most piracy sites.

As I've said, this is not a big issue with the sites listed on the uptime tracker I linked. Libgen.is and Z-library have neither (the latter has daily download limits per IP), AA has a countdown (not always), and libgen.li has ads (which I had no idea about until I saw other people mentioning it, thanks to uBlock).

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Neat. If only I actually read what I download. Ngl, the only book that I've read start to end in the last 8 years was the easy way to stop smoking by alen carr

[–] weirdo_from_space@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I decided to push my gaming to only evenings because I was unhappy with how much time it consumed, so now I read during the day.

I don't know if you play video games so this may not be helpful to you, but doing this skyrocketed my reading.

[–] gonzo-rand19@moist.catsweat.com 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I used short essays and short stories to get back into reading, maybe that approach would help you. They're really old, but try A Modest Proposal or some of the satirical essays by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), they're short and sweet and inspire a desire for more.

[–] maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

If you like reading older books, check out https://standardebooks.org/. They make nice digital editions of public domain works for free.

[–] gonzo-rand19@moist.catsweat.com 1 points 2 days ago

Nice, looks like a bit more care went into the visual presentation in comparison to Project Gutenberg. Thanks for sharing.

[–] UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

collapsed inline media

[–] Anono14168@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What is on libgen? Movies? Animes? Songs?

[–] Throbbing_banjo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago

Books. They have both non-fiction and fiction. Between this and Anna's Archive I haven't paid for a book in years.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

collapsed inline media

[–] fossphi@lemm.ee 0 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Is there some more background to this, as in, what happened?

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

For years they've managed to keep their indexing (think html, not torrent) online by separating out the indexing from the actual storage. They've only changed URLs once in recent memory. Throughout the years they've stored content in various places. Protected safe havens, compromised websites, and ipfs.

There are still a lot of places in the world where hosting a link to data is not illegal.

Well through whatever methods required it looks like the publishers finally managed to shut down the search/hosting on wherever .is was pointing to.

There is a static IPFS index laying around somewhere so technically the content's still quite available. Along with Torrents.

Well they finally managed to bring it back up somewhere and I don't even care to go and figure out where that is. Just glad they're still around.

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago

It's been offline for like a month, maybe more, I haven't kept track. I don't know any details, maybe there's info on their forums, but overall the owners are quite secretive.