The author has shared a behind-the-scenes look at the design journey, explaining the challenges and thought processes behind bringing this retro-inspired player to life, though in Chinese:
Z-library Weixin Public Account / Bilibili Account Statement:
The volunteers operating the public account and the Bilibili account have not participated in any operations of the zlibrary website, have not received any donations, and are completely unaware of the politically related books uploaded by users on the zlibrary website.
Regarding the Website:
Effective immediately, the Z-library website
1. No longer accept any donations from mainland China.
2. Block any access from mainland China.
3. Discontinue the Z-Point project in Mainland China.
The website will reopen access to Mainland China IP addresses after a selection process and removal of certain (Added by op: political) books in the coming days.
The official Z-Library blog https://z-library.se/blog/50 doesn't mention removal of any books or that they're blocking Mainland Chinese users/donations on their end.
I guess the "Zlibrary Official" WeChat account is run by people who were operating an unofficial mirror site (there's lots of these, many quite shady) and collected donations for their own use via Chinese payment methods, which has now gotten them into hot water.
It seems like they think they can continue operating as long as they remove a handful of books from the mirror, but I somewhat doubt it. The manual effort required for censorship compliance is likely to be substantial.
EDIT: the Internet Archive has a snapshot of the donations page http://web.archive.org/web/20240403051246/https://z-library.... with Alipay and WeChat Pay listed, so there must've been a money trail to someone in China. Maybe the WeChat Official Account is more official than I thought.
Push services could leak notification metadata, and, usually without end user's knowledge, access message contents. The problem is that, we all know Huawei's role in the censorship of mainland China...
