Too big for its own good.Anna and/or the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) team Z-Library has started as a clone of Library Genesis, another similar site, but it had gotten clearly bigger and better. For certain, some alternative will pop up sooner or later as books are small and easy to share. Perhaps the web site will surface once again. It is not clear exactly if all of the Z-Library team have been identified and stopped. Apparently, they just got too annoying and were crushed as soon as the will to stop them materialized. The investigation was of course helped by Google and Amazon, but it's pretty clear that the duo did not use any smart way of protecting their identity. We know from numerous examples that the American government is terrified of technical people with access to information and the ability to disseminate it and banks on making examples of them as much as possible, so while I am rooting for them, I doubt the two will ever be truly free every again. Not unexpected, the site operators were Russian, Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova, and were apprehended in Argentina by local forces, although it's not clear if they will be extradited to the U.S. Strange how much effort can be done to close down sites with actual information on them. With sadness I found out that Z-Library, a web site filled with (pirated) free books and science papers has been shut down by FBI, in collaboration with Argentina, Amazon and Google.

Z library down