No idea where they’re coming from, but people have been exchanging files on IRC files for year, why stop now? The obscurity of it is probably the only reason it’s still around, it will never get enough attention for traffic to overload the servers, and nobody will bother trying to hit them with lawsuits.

Libgen is great for popular books, but the above guide is amazing for finding basically anything else. I’ve often needed to load up IRC to find more obscure books.

As someone who can never find the right cable, I like using calibre’s content server. You start it up then open up the kindles built in browser and go to the listed address and download your books from there.