With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.

Get started as a peer-to-peer librarian with the IPFS Free Library guide at freeread.org.

About a year ago I made a plea to help safeguard Library Genesis: a free library collection of over 2.5 million scientific textbooks and 2.4 million fiction novels. Within a few weeks we had thousands of seeders, a nonprofit sponsorship from seedbox.io/NForce.nl, and coverage in TorrentFreak and Vice. Totally incredible community support for this mission, thank you for all your support.

After that we tackled the 80 million articles of Sci-Hub, the world-renowned scientific database proxy that allows anyone, anywhere to access any scientific article for free. That science belongs to the world now, and together we preserved two of the most important library collections in human history.

Fighting paywalls

Then COVID-19 arrived. Scientific publishers like Elsevier paywalled early COVID-19 research and prior studies on coronaviruses, so we used the Sci-Hub torrent archive to create an unprecedented 50-year Coronavirus research capsule to fight the paywalling of pandemic science (Vice, Reddit). And we won that fight (Reddit/Change.org, whitehouse.gov).

In those 2 months we ensured that 85% of humanity’s scientific research was preserved; then we wrestled total open access to COVID-19 from some of the biggest publishing companies in the world. What’s next?

p2p Library

The Library Genesis and Sci-Hub libraries have faced intense legal attacks in recent years. That means domain takedowns, server shutdowns and international womanhunts/manhunts. But if we love these libraries, then we can help these libraries. That’s where you, reader, come in.

The Library Genesis IPFS-based peer-to-peer distributed library system is live as of today. Now, you can lend any book in the 6-million book collection to any library visitor, peer-to-peer. Your charitable bandwidth can deliver books to thousands of other readers around the world every day. That sounds incredibly awe-inspiring, awesome and heart-warming, and I am blown away by what’s possible next.

The decentralized internet and these two free library projects are absolutely incredible. Visit the IPFS Free Library guide at freeread.org to get started.

Call for devs

Library Genesis needs a strong open source code foundation, but it is still surviving without one. Efforts are underway to change that, but they need a few smart hands.

• libgen.fun is a new IPFS-based Library Genesis fork with an improved PHP frontend, rebuilt with love by the visionary unsung original founder of Library Genesis, bookwarrior
• Knowl Bookshelf is a new open source library frontend based on Elasticsearch and Kibana that aims to unify all ebook databases (i.e. Project Gutenberg Project, Internet Archive, Open Library) under a single interface
• Readarr is an open-source NodeJS-based ebook manager for Usenet/BitTorrent with planned IPFS integration (“the Sonarr of books”)
• Miner’s Hut has put out a call for developers for specific dire feature requirements. A functioning open source copy of the actual libgen PHP codebase is also available for forking.

Reach out, lend a hand, borrow a book! Thank you for all your help and to the /r/DataHoarder community for supporting this mission.

shrine. freeread.org