The Lineages and Inheritances of Shadow Libraries and their Documentation - Martin Paul Eve

"Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption.

This is a post about pirate libraries and their technologies and documentation. Before we go any further, I wish to clarify that I am not endorsing any of these sites and am certainly not involved in any of their operations. I am merely interested in them as a scholarly publishing phenomenon. To write this post, I had to look at the Anna’s Archive metadata set.

In this post, I discuss how, with every takedown of a pirate archive that occurs, it becomes harder and harder to resurrect a catalogue with a concrete lineage. Therefore, I posit, it is not clear who will have the resources to continue pirate systems like Anna’s Archive, if it is taken down, which I suspect it will be."