For those who may not know, this is a front-end to LibGen. I like the search feature more and use it now and then, but for me the 5-downloads-per-24h limitation is usually quite limiting.
I have hundreds of books I want to dump if I substitute the digital version on my disk. When in discard mode, I easily hit the 10/day limit of a free account. But that is what the favorites list is for, to spread things out over days.
Collect (I presume you mean download?) is an easy part and I agree one can download thousands of books in 24h. Skimming is very different from reading is very different from learning. If you want to skim titles/headlines then yes it's a limitation. I'd just argue it's not what books are for.
Who are you to decide what books are for, especially on a pirate site? I use libgen for research. Trying to figure out if a book is good for what I'm looking for is hard! In a traditional physical library, I'd sit in the stacks and scan through sometimes dozens of books before finding what I'm looking for. Then I'd check out those few books and read them more in depth.
From my experiences with it, in LibGen you have to search exactly what you want. A simple typo ruins it. Z-library is a better in that regards, so typos don't really ruin the search, allowing you to find stuff more easily.
I don't know whether they have a different dataset of books, but the search engine is definitely vastly superior. Not only in looks, but most importantly in terms of results.
Promotion of piracy web-sites on the front of HN, nice. While we're at it, gen.lib.rus.ec is a good one, too (less fancy but without the 5 books/day limitation).
Correct. Library genesis itself (see https://libgen.rs/ or https://libgen.fun/) is run by volunteers on a strictly non-commercial basis and does not charge for access or accounts.
This looks pretty sketchy. The FAQ, blog and DMCA links from the posted page all 404. Seems odd for a site that supposedly has been providing ebooks since 2009
I'm not even going to try clicking the book, article or sign in links
I was under the impression that (at least the books section) is a giant free-for-all download archive, i.e. pirated works (== download epubs of commercial novels you didn't pay for).