Z-Library seized by the US Department of Justice

[Aglaea]

In case anyone did not know, why the website wasn't working anymore...

Article:

On Friday, November 4, domain names of Z-Library, the website which claimed to be the world's largest ebook library, were seized by the US Department of Justice.

For years, Z-Library has been a resource for university students and voracious readers alike, virtually offering approximately 10 million ebooks, academic texts, general-interest nonfiction books, and 86 million scholarly journal articles for free.

Some of the domains are now not loading, while others lead to a message saying, "This domain has been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service in accordance with a court order".

Virtually anyone with an internet connection could easily download their books or articles of choice from the site for free. The website's function of allowing users to contribute to the vast virtual library system allowed readers to disseminate their knowledge and make literature more accessible around the world.

(...)

Booktok spearheads the movement
The Z-Library site was taken down after Booktokers began sharing the link publicly, especially for Colleen Hoover's latest novel, It Starts With Us (Atria Books, 2022).

A couple of viral TikToks about the novel being free for download on Z-Library spearheaded the #zlibrary hashtag to amass over 19 million views on Tiktok. The hashtag had been gaining popularity for a while, but more and more authors recently started noticing the dire effects of their novels being circulated online.

This is why it's so important to not share certain info on social media and other platforms!!! A tweet or tiktok about a site could blow up and get massive views, leading to authorities to look into the site and ultimately pull it from the internet. Stupid people (yes, my opinion they were) were literally showing on there how to access and download popular books while tagging said authors and books in their tiktoks as well! That website has been online for years and it was only until this tiktok popularity that things went bad.

Years ago, I remember seeing a member's (here) GR and they had books tagged with this Dpgroup name along with other sites like ours. I never understood why anyone would do that and risk this site. Especially when authors and publishers are on Goodreads and can see the shelves!

So, sharing this for information but also to hopefully warn people to be careful about when and where they share websites, especially if you want them to stick around for a long time!