Be sure to scan them too. I've had virus total detect one or two things on different books.
Really? A virus on ebooks? Damn
Yes on PDFs in this case. It is designed to exploit the PDF reader when you open it. Though less common today it's still an avenue of attack to watch out for. It depends on the reader too but why take a chance if something is detected
Are EPUB files safe?
I have not come across infected epubs myself but it is possible see https://security.stackexchange.com/posts/176225/revisions for some background.
So, how do you download and use PDFs from Anna's Archive or a similar site? Do you download it to a computer that you just use for downloads, then scan the file using Virus Total, then read only on that computer? (I usually read on my phone using Overdrive, just trying to figure out the safest way as a newbie).
Personally I DL on a Linux machine and then upload to virus total. If they are clean, then I transfer them to an old android tablet without internet access for reading. If I was reading them on the machine I'd open them in a linux VM, either alpine or fedora silverblue with network aceess disabled.
The state of the art is qubes OS that has a tool to neuter a PDF by taking screenshots and building a new PDF in different VMs.
There's this program which supposedly will take a PDF and if it's unsafe make it safe. https://dangerzone.rocks/
I've only heard of it today, so I have no idea about its efficacy.
If it works by opening it in a sandbox then taking screenshots or printing it back to a new PDF. It should be good.
Edit: just read the github and it works exactly like this
Sounds like a good service to covertly insert malware /s
Ah I forgot about that. I remember when Micah Lee started that years ago and posted about it on twitter.
I must give it a try and see how it performs. Thanks for the reminder
I love that site! I've gotten so many books from there. Thanks for making sure more people know about it.
I recommend pairing that with Calibre to manage all the ebooks you get, and to convert them into useable formats for your device(s).
Thanks I was sad after z-lib went down.
You can still access z-lib via Tor.
this is why i like onions :)
Can you recommend a guide?
Here are the official links: https://zlibrary-global.se/z-access#useful_link_tab. I would recommend just opening the .onion link (last tab on the page) with the Tor Browser in Safe mode and logging in with an anonymous e-mail and random password. Nowadays I'd rather use Anna's Archive, though, it has most of the Z-Library database indexed anyway
Just found out about this myself and it's top tier. The best way to find ebooks IMO. If it doesn't work, use IRC, and if that doesn't work, sign up for Myanonamouse. And if that doesn't just buy the fucking thing. Actually, request it from your library first and then use a de-drm tool to keep it forever
Remember to check the Internet Archive library, you can easily borrow lots of amazing quality books for free and even rip the files. The Standard Template Construct has lots of stuff too, especially recent scientific articles Sci-Hub hasn't published yet
Damn Anna, you so hot! I'm gonna kiss you!
If you use sites like this and you have epubs and pdfs to contribute, make sure that you do! I recently uploaded a book I had access to from my school days for others to use through libgen. I had to search really hard to find it when I didn’t have a lot of money for textbooks. I hope what I uploaded helps others. Be sure to contribute!
awesome. Thanks for sharing. If & when libgen or zlib is down, I'll try this out.
seems like this one actually has data from both libgen and zlib, so you can search in one place and get results from both! pretty cool
It's replaced libgen and zlib for me, as there are links to libgen and zlib files at the bottom of most of the pages I've seen. Really cool!
libgen seems to be one of their sources
From what I understand, isn't this site's Z-Library content taken from the torrent dumps when the site originally got taken off the clearweb? In that case, won't it be a bit out-of-date?
They index results from five sources and update the main ones (two LibGen forks) monthly. They mirrored the Z-Library database before the website was seized (end of November 2022), indexed the new .onion addresses and haven't updated the dataset since because they're waiting for the situation to stabilize in order to figure out a way to regularly fetch new stuff from there too, as far as I know
Also libgen iirc
damn, this looks pretty amazing. thanks for sharing!
I've got a book that has been out of print for decades that I've painstakingly scanned in page by page. Is there a way I can donate it to the archive?
upload it to archive.org and if you want send me the pdf in DM and I will take care of uploading it to Anna's archive
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