> What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free.
I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.
Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.
I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.
Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.