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Comment by waqf | Hacker News Reader

Books are small enough that this has pretty much already happened (search for "library genesis").

Library genesis is the best thing that happened to research since Google (and a huge number of researchers use it, secretly). Being able to access any obscure technical book in the world in a few seconds is literally orders of magnitude more efficient than waiting a week for an interlibrary loan. I dread the day it inevitably gets shut down due to pressure from the copyright mafia. It's ridiculous that such a service isn't 1) legal, and 2) publicly funded (with due compensation to the authors).

Could you explain more exactly what "library genesis" is? Is it a collection of basically every book ever published or only modern things? Did someone scan everything, like Google books?

It's basically a huge collection of documents, mostly scientific with a FOSS codebase for serving. It comes with metadata. It is mirrored a lot thanks to bring completely open. It originated in Russia and has had quite the history. It is a great step into the direction how documents (especially scientific) should be available to anyone in bulk without restrictions.

Thank you for that.

Everything I find related to that seems to have been shut down, are you getting better luck?

First result on uncensored search engines.

Some libgen sites may be blocking IP addresses from certain countries. If so, try another mirror, or use a proxy.

gen.lib.rus.ec and bookfi.org both work for me, some time ago I investigated the origin of those collections and apparently they began as a set of 30+ dvds that have been distributed presumably primarily in russia for quite some time.

Especially in math and physics they are every poor graduate students dream. Even large libraries have only one copy of some of those books stuffed away in some underground vault.

And engineering and CS, both undergrad and postgrad. Fantastic website for when the library was out of stock of that book published 40 years ago that there's only 3 copies of in the country...

Holy shit... Just tried some obscure stuff I'd been trying to find for ages. This is amazing

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