Spring fundraising, Moderators, updated book page, Z-Alerts & book requests regulations, language filter for booklists, and more

Apr 01, 2022
105k views

Hello,

It's been a long time since our last post. What’s new? Big things, actually. Our Team has been busy making upgrades for the library.

On April 1, we successfully completed our spring fundraiser. Our team would like wholeheartedly to thank all the users who participated (and those who couldn't support us but really wanted to) in the spring fundraiser. We have also considered all of your wishes and suggestions to improve the project. Thank you very much!

Do you know that we have recently passed the 10 million-book upload barrier?! Over the past few years, our book collection has grown significantly thanks to you, our users. To improve the quality of the collection, we have launched a moderation section for uploaded books and invited our trusted users to become moderators. Book moderation will greatly reduce the number of spam, junk files and books with incorrect information. Here's a list of the top ones who have moderated most of the books:


If you want to help the community, you can apply to become a moderator (on a volunteer basis). Please send us your request with the subject "I want to become a Moderator" and include your account email address. We will be extremely grateful for your help! Only by our joint efforts can we put and keep order in our huge collection of books, without your participation and help it is impossible.

We are constantly improving the design of the library, making it clearer and easier to use on any device. As you may have noticed, we have recently refreshed the design of the main sections (login form, menu, profile page, etc.). Today we'll tell you about the redesigned book page.

  • We have slightly changed the mechanism of file downloading after conversion. When the conversion is complete, the file will start downloading automatically.
  • Now, you can not only download the converted file, but also send it to Kindle/E-mail/Google Drive/Telegram. Remember, if you download/send the same book several times during 1 session (24 server hours), it will not affect your download limit.
  • We have separated "Send-to-Kindle" and "Send to email" options (now they are two different buttons). If you convert the file to MOBI/PDF to send to your Kindle, it will be sent automatically after conversion.
  • The "Send to email" and "Send to Google Drive" options are now located under the "Send to" button. There is also a new option "Send to Telegram", which allows you to send a file to the Telegram bot.


Some changes have been made to the Z-Alerts as well. Since the release of this feature, you have created over 9000 Z-Alerts and many of them have already lost their relevance. Therefore, we made it possible to inactivate them, and also limited the duration of active alerts to 6 months. After 6 months, you will receive an email notification with a list of alerts that will soon become inactive. They won’t be deleted and will still be displayed on the Z-Alerts page, you will be able to reactivate these alerts or delete them.


Similar changes have been applied to book requests. To actualize the list of all book requests (about 200,000) and eliminate the irrelevant ones, we have introduced the following regulation: only 100 incomplete book requests can be active for a user. This will keep the list of requests up to date and increase the upload speed for books that are truly in demand. The active request has a validity of 6 months, thereafter, you will receive an email notification with a list of requests that will soon become inactive (i.e., you will be automatically unsubscribed from these requests). Currently, you can activate them using a link in the email, but very soon we will make activation on the website.

The following feature is for advanced librarians to make it easier to organize their personal book collection. On the Edit Profile page, you can customize the filename template, and every downloaded book will have a name according to the template you set up.


Do you know what Terms are? Have you ever used this feature on our website? A few years ago we managed to identify the most frequent words in the text of books, and these words we called Terms (located on the book page under the recommendations). Recently, we identified Terms for subcategories (beta testing), so you can get more accurate search results. We could say it's a kind of automatically generated tags for subcategories. You can specify a search query and select a Term or just use a Term. The Terms are only available on the subcategory page and only for English books.


We are glad to find that the Booklists option is gradually becoming popular. To make it easier for our interested users to search for public booklists in different languages, we made a filter by language. You will see only those booklists that have at least 3 books in the selected language(s) (the order of books in the booklist will also be sorted according to the filter parameters).


Small improvement for Kindle users: in the Search Options - Extensions appeared a new filter "Available for Kindle". Selecting it in your search results will display only those books that can be sent to Kindle (MOBI, PDF) and that are available for conversion with further sending to Kindle (EPUB).


Good news for users of our Android App! Very soon we will release a big update, with some visual improvements and 27 interface languages (Español, Italiano, ελληνικά, اللغة العربية, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, हिन्दी, Deutsch, Français, Português, Русский, Українська, Polski, 汉语, 日本語, Tiếng Việt, Azərbaycan Dili, Հայոց լեզու, ภาษาไทย, Türk Dili, ქართველი, বাংলা, پښتو, తెలుగు, اردو, 한국어, Srpski). Follow the updates.

You see, we have a lot of news that we were excited to share with you. Thank you for using and supporting Z-Library. Until next time!

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R. David Lankes