The benefit of Anna’s Archive is that they have goodwill on their side. They are trying to contribute to academic research directly, whereas libgen seems to prioritize profit (and has to, to survive).
Anna’s Archive does that too. The "donations" are actually paying to access features. But by proactively reaching out to the academic community like this, they’ll make a lot of powerful allies.
EDIT: on second thought, how does libgen monetize? I thought they ran ads, but I just realized I didn’t verify that.
Whoever runs a library like this for altruistic reasons stands to win. The desire to get rich is most of the problem with doing shady things scalably. One can argue that it’s the risk/reward tradeoff, but I suspect as technology makes everything more accessible, an operation like this only costs a few thousand a month. That’s achievable while flying under the radar long enough to hopefully avoid getting in a lot of trouble.
Of course, as with death note, everything comes down to: don’t get caught.
The original LibGen, under anonymous and altruistic founder bookwarrior, did not aim to monetize but was built purely on volunteer effort. Some of the LibGen domains, however, are forks that put up advertisements.
What do we do now?