I got burned buying a trilogy with a good rating on goodreads. I only read the first 1.5 books and didn't bother after that.
It sucked and when I looked again later it had a more relevant rating. I think the initial score was gamed by bots.
So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it, which I've done most recently for Children of Time.
Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.
One problem I see with annas archive is that there is a tendency towards older books. Now I do understand this for many reasons, but ... I recently read a book about steel construction in 1932, just for curiousity. I wanted to find a more recent one - did not even have to be, say, 1990 or 2000 or some such, but I simply could not find any (well, perhaps english speaking, but this is also a problem in that non-english languages are VERY underpresented in general).
I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.
There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen.
You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to
So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it, which I've done most recently for Children of Time.
Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.
Second language in the world by native speakers, piracy being effectively legal in Spain (non commercially), and so on.
[0]: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.
There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen.
You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to