My go-to banned book site got blocked last week

I was trying to pull up a PDF of 'The Satanic Verses' for a friend and the whole domain just timed out. I had to dig through an old Reddit thread to find a mirror site hosted in Iceland. Has anyone else had their usual sources for this stuff suddenly vanish?

3 comments

3 Comments

ryan7191mo ago

Man that's rough, I feel for you. I had a similar thing happen with my go-to archive for older sci-fi zines, the whole site just went dark one morning with no warning. It's such a pain having to hunt down mirrors on sketchy subreddits, especially when you're trying to grab something like 'The Satanic Verses' which is already hard enough to find online. Iceland mirrors are usually pretty solid though, at least until they get shut down too. Really hope you can keep that one up and running for a while.

charles_coleman1mo ago

Wait, hold on - you said "The Satanic Verses." That book that got Rushdie attacked? I thought that was basically impossible to find online without, like, a deep dive into the dark web or something. Honestly, I'm kind of shocked you even tried. I mean, I get the appeal of grabbing a controversial text, but that's one of those titles that feels like it's flagged everywhere. The fact that you're hunting for it on some Iceland mirror is wild to me. I guess if anyone's gonna host it, it'd be a server in a place that doesn't fold to pressure easily. Still, I'd be super careful with that one, dude.

the_ryan1mo ago

Wonder if the Iceland host is running on bulletproof hosting or just flying under the radar.