Library Genesis is down | Hacker News Reader

Library Genesis is down

libgen.io

41 pointsgodelmachine11 comments

At one point one has to ask oneself: what's even the point intaking down a website? I was the work of someone else and not of chance, as were the other cases in which libgen/scihub were inacessible. But really, at this point it probably takes more effort to take down a website to put it up on another domain. It probably doesn't take more than a couple of hours, at the worst case, while take downs -- if they have any bureaucratic existence -- must have been parked at someone's office for longer than that. Why these people still pretend they control anything on the internet?

The simple answer is that because whack-a-mole works to a limited extent, and when you run out of options it is worth the effort. Yes, there are alternate paths for users to take, but by eliminating the easiest or most well-known addresses you raise the bar for some users and add friction into the process. Putting up a new site takes a few hours, but getting the word out and dealing with the inevitable rise of malware/adware/ppc-stuffed bottom-feeding clones that will try to use this event to harvest victims will end up creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt among casual users. Sometimes this is good enough for the powers that be.

As a university student, Library Genesis is probably the greatest thing ever created.

And for those who (like me) don't know what this is, lemme google that for ya. From the short Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis):

"Library Genesis or LibGen is a search engine for articles and books on various topics, which allows free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. Among others it carries PDF's of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal."

[...] and

"As of November 2017, the Library Genesis database contains more than 2.1 million books."

libgen.pw is a mirror I usually use

libgen.io has some advantages. In my opinion the best advantage is that the search results also list the format of book results. It is easier to find a particular format, like epub. You can find out the format on libgen.pw, but it takes an extra step, involving going back and forth between the search results page, and individual book description pages.

That said, as of this moment, libgen.pw is up, even if libgen.io isn't.

Still up at http://gen.lib.rus.ec

This is also a good time to remind people that there is a torrent backup. If you have a seedbox or just space on your computer consider downloading a few and seeding! http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/

Shame it doesn't show which are least seeded for people who aren't prepared to seed them all.

Wonder if this feature could be added to torrent clients.

The tracker already knows how many seeders there are, doesn't need anything in the torrent clients.

The link you gave is a lifesaver! Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Having gone through Library Genesis' Wikipedia entry a couple of times, I was surprised at myself for not having thought about this before!!

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