Digital Piracy in Higher Education: Exploring Social Media Users and Chinese Postgraduate Students Motivations for Supporting ‘Academic Cybercrime’ by shelving ebooks from Z-Library

Abstract

Z-library, an electronic books (ebooks) website, was shut down in November 2022 for cybercriminal activity. This created a milieu to investigate its educational significance in higher educational institutes. Adopting social representation theory, this article explores 134 comments in r/Z-Library a Reddit subforum populated across social media during the takedown. These users’ views are contextualised against opinions from 103 Higher Education (HE) postgraduate students in China, who were engaged in a qualitative study including a survey, focus group and ethnographic observation of a classroom debate. Analysis found an overlap between both groups and suggests that universities need to re-consider digital divides faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Academic poverty, caused by the cost of academic literature and journals, was found to drive students and social media users towards piracy. The article concludes by recommending that universities must consider how to reduce piracy, as institutional libraries move into post-digital futures. These recommendations highlight, then, that if learners must resort to ‘academic cybercrime’ a rethink is needed about how universities enable a culture of lifelong learning.