It wasn’t just that the website went down, it was that American Federal law enforcement seized the domains, blocked the site, and arrested the two individuals who had been maintaining it.

That being said, even if Z-Library did lose me a large amount of income, I don’t think I’d like to see it destroyed in my name. This builds up and then twice a year I get sent a cheque. The site probably did lose me some revenue, but I don’t think it would have been all that much: I get a certain small amount for every book bought by a shop, rather than for every book actually sold. The FBI seized the website’s domains shortly after it went viral on TikTok so, once again, that app is probably to blame. A good portion of them, of course, were books currently available to buy from ebook stores. Some of those would have been public domain, some of them were inaccessible or out-of-print. In fact, according to Torrentfreak, there was (is?) around 12 million copies of books on the site. Everything was there, from Gawain and the Green Knight to Colleen Hoover’s Ugly Love to my own novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless, though I can’t imagine that was anywhere near half as popular as those other two examples. Instead of the self-serious aesthetic of the Internet Archive, Z-Library was simple to use and did not foreground any sort of ideological reason for its existence. Rather in contrast to the public domain content uploaded to websites such as Project Gutenberg, Z-Library was for everything. Z-Library was essentially comparable to a Pirate Bay for ebooks and pdfs. Z-Library was the bane of many authors’ and publishers’ existence, as hated by them as it was beloved by students and low-income readers everywhere. Early this month, a cry was heard across the internet, a cry that would echo throughout the weeks to come: “Z-Library is gone… they took Z-Lib down… ”

Z library down