Their free model was much more than enough for a regular user to use. I mean 10 books download per day? I'm not sure if I personally would have had to ever exceed that limit.
Which is bad. They made a mirror of Libgen, closed it and charged money for access to it. You were unable to create a mirror from their mirror. Why put a limit at all? Why charge for access, just as same as publishers do? Defeats entire purpose of Libgen and SciHub.
I understand what you're saying but if you look at the effects alone (and not the means), it seems well justified. Their increased revenue allowed them to provide more and more (than LibGen at least) books to the users free of charge. I do not know the difficulties involved in mirroring Z-Library, but there seems to be someone who did it recently and posted to HN before the site went down.
