As always, when one copyright-infringing service is shut down, it's replaced by something more distributed and robust: it's called Library Genesis. As I understand it, they distribute the catalogue in incremental chunks via BitTorrent, which means there are multiple mirrors and no single point of failure.

That actually sounds like a great idea. I have nothing but time at the moment (start-up I was working for recently laid me off) I will definitely consider a project along those lines. Thanks for the recommendation.