Scribd, Oyster, and Kindle Unlimited all give you a “netflix for books” type experience where you pay a monthly fee of about $10 and read as many books as you want (not newer books, unfortunately). (Kindle Unlimited might be better if you have a non-Kindle-Fire kindle device it will work well with, but since publishers don’t like Amazon it will never have as good quality of a selection as the other two.) Your local library may also have ebook lending options.
Note when using libgen search engines, gwern writes: “I’ve noticed the Libgen search engines seem to have problems with long titles and/or colons” so you may wish to strip those.
Someone else recommends searching on the Pirate Bay, especially when combined with “pdf”/other typical book file extensions.
You can get invites on the IRC channel, but make sure you already have a few ebooks on hand you can offer to upload
Is that like needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience?
People who don’t have access to private trackers already would probably not have any material that anyone needs unless they personally pirated their own book direct from the source. (I remember back when people had to do anime trading by postal mail, how that would lead to a similar catch-22 where you couldn’t get anything unless you had something to trade.)
It also fails in the scenario where someone is not really a pirate, but they just want a single item which is impossible to reasonably get through normal channels and so have resorted to pirating in this one instance.
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-library-nu
Scribd, Oyster, and Kindle Unlimited all give you a “netflix for books” type experience where you pay a monthly fee of about $10 and read as many books as you want (not newer books, unfortunately). (Kindle Unlimited might be better if you have a non-Kindle-Fire kindle device it will work well with, but since publishers don’t like Amazon it will never have as good quality of a selection as the other two.) Your local library may also have ebook lending options.
BTW, if you want papers rather than books, this browser extension or this thread (actually, use this more recent one) may be of interest, esp. this site or this site or this site or this site (some of these might be searching the same database) or http://reddit.com/r/scholar or the #icanhaspdf twitter hashtag or this Facebook group
Note when using libgen search engines, gwern writes: “I’ve noticed the Libgen search engines seem to have problems with long titles and/or colons” so you may wish to strip those.
Someone else recommends searching on the Pirate Bay, especially when combined with “pdf”/other typical book file extensions.
Another cool site. reddit discussion of book piracy. List of LibGen mirrors. EBook search engine? Another list of sites. And another even longer one. Quora thread compiling sites. Another list. Another list. Haven’t tried this site yet. Or this.
Don’t forget about libraries either! https://www.worldcat.org
Reddit claims duckduckgo can be good for finding pirated stuff.
Some info on private trackers for pirated ebooks.
Just saw this Facebook group for getting papers. There’s also this. And https://libkey.io/
Is that like needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience?
People who don’t have access to private trackers already would probably not have any material that anyone needs unless they personally pirated their own book direct from the source. (I remember back when people had to do anime trading by postal mail, how that would lead to a similar catch-22 where you couldn’t get anything unless you had something to trade.)
It also fails in the scenario where someone is not really a pirate, but they just want a single item which is impossible to reasonably get through normal channels and so have resorted to pirating in this one instance.
Well, you might try this thread full of other methods for pirating books ;) Or buy ebooks and pirate them, but yes this is a bigger investment.
Just saw this recommended on /r/nootropics for getting papers; can’t vouch for quality/usefulness: http://www.deepdyve.com/
LW paper pirating thread, here’s another
Another blog post on pirating scientific papers (hello, Recent Comments!):
http://www.samuelpean.com/icanhazpdf-reddit-scholar-pirateuniversity-org-aaaaarg-org-how-scientist-community-bypasses-journals-paywalls/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jjm73l/how_to_read_almost_all_scientific_papers_for_free/
More ways to get scientific papers: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1404
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