ZLibrary acknowledges this, but the site had no idea that this would result in an immediate domain suspension. Now.top received a DMCA notice from Harvard Business Publishing, listing several infringing publications that were posted on. The Chinese company informed us that ZLibrary was contacted beforehand in the form of a takedown notice. To find out more, we reached out to the registrar Eranet, which operates under the Now.top brand. ZLibrary has been around for over a decade and it lost domain names on three previous occasions. This isn’t the first time the platform has run into domain issues. When we contacted the site earlier this week it informed us that the domains simply disappeared without any notification from the registrar. In this case, it was a legal issue, although that was initially unclear to the ZLibrary team.

This is a serious issue and, according to ICANN, the clienthold status is uncommon and “usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment,” or when a “domain is subject to deletion.”

This meant that they were no longer accessible. Seemingly out of nowhere, ZLibrary’s, , and b-ok.xyz domains were all set to “clienthold” by their Chinese registrar “Now.top”. A few days ago, however, alarm bells went off. This includes ZLibrary, which is available through a variety of domain names. In recent years, much attention has been focused on Sci-Hub but there are many other ‘shadow libraries’ as well. Pretty much every book or academic article is available online for free.

While movie and music piracy tends to generate the most headlines, the publishing industry is facing similar issues.

Ebooks zlibrary