Library Genesis

Library Genesis (LibGen) is a digital library established on 11 March 2008.

"Library Genesis started in 2008 as an initiative to make ‘KOLXO3’, a famous digital offline collection of 59,000 scientific ebooks, that was distributed on 64 manually-copied DVD drives, available online [1]. An open-source indexing and search engine were developed. After that LibGen continued to grow by accepting uploads from users and absorbing collections of other shadow libraries, including Natahaus and Library.nu — but unlike these websites, LibGen did not emphasize community features and positioned itself as a kind of index or meta-library project instead. The project produced a number of mirrors and forks i.e. Z-Library and turned out to be the most resilient shadow library that still remains functional and updated with new literature," while some of its mirrors got shut down. [2]

About LibGen

• "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub", 30 Nov 2015. Open letter.
  • translations.
• Guillaume Cabanac, "Bibliogifts in LibGen? A Study of a Text-Sharing Platform Driven by Biblioleaks and Crowdsourcing", Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67:4, 2015, pp 874-884.
• Sarah Laskow, "The Rise of Pirate Libraries", Atlas Obscura, 21 Apr 2016.
• Balázs Bodó, "The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library", in Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, ed. Joe Karaganis, MIT Press, 2018, pp 25-51. [3]
• Balázs Bodó, "Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge", in Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, ed. Joe Karaganis, MIT Press, 2018, pp 53-77. [4]
• Andy Maxwell, "Meet the Guy Behind the Libgen Torrent Seeding Movement", TorrentFreak, 5 Dec 2019.
• Roberto Cruz Arzabal, "La piratería como forma imposible: circulación y estratificación de la teoría contemporánea", in Exclusión y deriva: dinámicas fronterizas de la digitalidad, eds. Johanna C. Ángel Reyes and Joseba Buj, Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México, Jan 2020, pp 163-186. (Spanish)
• Balázs Bodó, Dániel Antal, Zoltán Puha, "Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia", PLoS ONE 15:12, Dec 2020.
• Bella Ostromooukhova, "“Free libraries for the free people”: How mass-literature “shadow” libraries circumvent digital barriers and redefine legality in contemporary Russia", First Monday 26:5, May 2021.
• Martin Paul Eve, "Lessons from Library Genesis: Extreme Minimalist Scaling at Pirate Ebook Platforms", Digital Humanities Quarterly 16:1, 2022. [5]

Links

• LibGen+ (beware of popups): https://libgen.li, https://libgen.vg, https://libgen.la, https://libgen.bz, https://libgen.gl/
• SLUM: The Shadow Library Uptime Monitor
• Archive of Library Genesis metadata snapshots
• datasets, mirrors: https://annas-archive.org/datasets/libgen_rs, https://annas-archive.org/datasets/libgen_li