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Brihaspati comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
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If a book exists in PDF on the web somewhere, I estimate a 90% of chance of finding it by at least one of the following four methods, which altogether take only a few minutes if you're practiced at it:
OK, I recently learned of a new way to pirate stuff: Usenet. The first rule of Usenet is supposedly "don't talk about Usenet", to avoid having the RIAA/MPAA learn about its usefulness, but I'll let you rationalist types in on the secret.
This appears to be the procedure for downloading pirated stuff off of Usenet (edit: googling around seems to yield improvements to this procedure, e.g. providers, indices, also this guide is more detailed):
Search on Binsearch.info or a similar Usenet search site to see if what you want exists on Usenet.
If it does, Giganews appears to be the most beginner-friendly Usenet provider (I assume once you get comfortable with Usenet, you can find a cheaper provider, but Giganews seems like a solid choice anyway). Sign up for Giganews (they give you a 2-week free trial, so you might want to plan out your downloads in advance to take advantage of the trial).
Use Binsearch to generate a .nzb file for the files you want to download (similar to a torrent file). Get an NZB downloader like SabNZBD. Configure it with the Giganews server (news.giganews.com) and your Giganews login credentials. Then feed it your .nzb file, which it should start to download.
Other Usenet client applications like Thunderbird and Pan have more capabilities, like allowing you to browse the Usenet newsgroup hierarchy, read messages, and post. As far as I can tell, Usenet is full of cranks, old people, spammers, tons of porn (much weird and some illegal), and tons of pirated stuff. I did find some relatively sane discussion here and there.
Thank you for making this list! It was still useful one year later on for me.
Please consider updating though. library.nu is down due to busybodies.
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 thread (actually, use this more recent one) may be of interest, esp. this site or this site or http://reddit.com/r/scholar or the #icanhaspdf twitter hashtag
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.
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.
Some info on private trackers for pirated ebooks.
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
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/
More ways to get scientific papers: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1404
http://libgen.info/index.php looks pretty nice. Found a book I had a hard time finding elsewhere, in multiple editions.
Redacted.
There's also
#ebookson irc.irchighway.net. Hard to use, but on occasion they have something that hasn't made it to any of the others.Filestube.com is useful for finding books on sites like rapidshare and megaupload. Bookfi.org is another good one.