Libgen, the one that we are most familiar with, is particularly useful for students/academics in the social sciences/humanities, as it has a large repository of books (old and new) in those disciplines.

Sci-hub, in contrast, is more useful for peer reviewed articles.

Interestingly the author is not that worried about books on math and physics since, as he argues, "simply paying close attention to reality" will recreate those ideas.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks for clarifying. Free access to academic information for all is a worthy goal.

One would hope that organisations hosting digital libraries of academic journals would hold those in perpetuity. But often the subscriptions are exploitatively expensive, and I'm of the opinion that such information should be made available for free. In any case, having private libraries as a backup is certainly a good idea for a variety of reasons.

The same goes for preserving the volumes of data that will inevitably be quietly binned and forgotten to save server space.