While movie and music piracy tends to generate the most headlines, the publishing industry is facing similar issues.
While movie and music piracy tends to generate the most headlines, the publishing industry is facing similar issues. Pretty much every book ever written is available online for free, including through so-called ‘shadow libraries’.
Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet. Through a variety of domain names, the site offers over 11 million books and 84 million articles. This has attracted a steady userbase and many millions of monthly visitors.
All books can be accessed at no cost but Z-Library also accepts donations. These donations provide a month of access to a variety of additional features, including more search results and the option to send books to the Kindle ebook reader.
Publishers and authors are not happy with the site and are actively trying to limit its exposure. Just recently, publishers won a site blocking order in France and they regularly target the site with takedown notices as well.
Z-Library was also mentioned in several recommendations to the US Trade Representative’s overview of notorious piracy markets. In some instances, third-party platforms such as TikTok were called out as well.
According to the Authors Guild, Z-Library has emerged as a vastly popular, high-volume source of illegal ebook downloads in recent years. This growth is facilitated by users who openly advertise the site on social media, TikTok included.
“The hashtag #zlibrary on popular social media platform TikTok has 4 million views, in reference to the countless videos posted by college and high school students and others across the world promoting it as the go-to place for free ebooks,” the Guild writes.
The USTR submission provides a detailed overview of the site and also contains comments from writers. They include NYT-bestselling author Sarina Bowen, who highlights TikTok’s ‘role’ in popularizing book piracy.
“Z-Library is killing us. A book we release in the morning is up on Z-library by lunchtime. All my books are up there,” Bowen says. “This isn’t the only site that hurts us, but it’s the site that keeps showing up in Tiktok videos.”
TikTok Responds
TikTok is not happy with this characterization. While the Authors Guild doesn’t recommend branding the platform as a notorious market, the social media platform responded to these and other rightsholder complaints in a letter to the USTR.
The Chinese company stresses that it takes the concerns of intellectual property owners seriously. It has procedures in place to prevent piracy and counterfeiting and has taken action in response to the Z-Library complaint.
TikTok says that it’s not doing anything wrong and like other online platforms, responds to takedown notices from rightsholders. The company says it also ‘bans’ problematic hashtags and after the Authors Guild complaint, #Zlibrary was blocked on the platform.
“Reducing user discoverability of content that violates our Community Guidelines is of paramount importance. Accordingly, TikTok proactively blocks search results for terms that violate our Community Guidelines, including terms that relate to counterfeit goods such as #designerdupe and #designerreplicas.
“We also recently blocked search results for #zlibrary while our team assesses content associated with that hashtag,” the platform explains.
Indeed, at the time of writing TikTok users will no longer find any content under the popular hashtag. This is a clear statement by TikTik but unlikely to prove effective against the constant stream of Z-Library videos.
In fact, TikTok’s Z-Library “discovery” page remains online and with 1.5 billion views, that’s getting a lot more exposure than the hashtag ever managed. In addition, Z-Library searches will return plenty of content as well.
This doesn’t mean that TikTok is doing anything wrong from a legal perspective. Similar videos appear on other sites as well, including Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and elsewhere.
In its letter to the USTR, TikTok reiterates that it will take action when rightsholders report problematic activity. The Authors Guild doesn’t dispute that, but it would like to see more proactive anti-piracy measures.
The good news for the authors is that not all TikTok users are soulless pirates. When searching for Z-Library, one can also find people questioning the ease at which others promote piracy.
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A copy of the Authors Guild submission to the USTR is available here (pdf) and TikTok’s response can be found here (pdf)
Update November 4: ZLibrary’s domains appear to have been seized (not related to TikTok).
