Library Genesis

Library Genesis
URL	https://libgen.rs
Status	Online!
Archiving status	Partially saved, see below
Archiving type	Unknown
IRC channel	#archiveteam-bs (on hackint)
Language(s)	Multilingual

Library Genesis is a Russian project to create a free online library of ebooks. They currently have about 4 million of them. The project is in blatant violation of copyright, and their domain name is blocked in some countries.

History

To explain the mess around multiple mirrors and forks this text was stolen researched from AA

The quick story of the different Library Genesis (or “Libgen”) forks, is that over time, the different people involved with Library Genesis had a falling out, and went their separate ways.

• The “.fun” version was created by the original founder. It is being revamped in favor of a new, more distributed version.
• The “.rs” version has very similar data, and most consistently releases their collection in bulk torrents. It is roughly split into a “fiction” and a “non-fiction” section. Originally at “http://gen.lib.rus.ec”.
• The “.li” version has a massive collection of comics, as well as other content, that is not (yet) available for bulk download through torrents. It does have a separate torrent collection of fiction books, and it contains the metadata of Sci-Hub in its database. According to this forum post, Libgen.li was originally hosted at “http://free-books.dontexist.com”.
• Z-Library in some sense is also a fork of Library Genesis, though they used a different name for their project.

Collections

Collection statistics was researched from Anna's Archive

Library Genesis "Classic"

Statistics as of October 2024^[update]:

• non-fiction (libgen_rs_non_fic on AA)
  • Size: 70.5 TiB in 4369 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 16 GiB
  • Last torrent: r_4370000.torrent [1]
  • 4,358,342 files
  • avg 17.8MB per file
• fiction (libgen_rs_fic on AA)
  • Size: 4.5 TiB in 3045 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 1.5 GiB
  • Last torrent: f_3044000.torrent [2]
  • 3,039,167 files
  • avg 1.6MB per file
• scimag (❗ Last update: 2021-11-14)
  • Size: 81.5 TiB in 876 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 95 GiB
  • Last torrent: sm_87500000-87599999.torrent [3]

Library Genesis "Plus"

• comics (libgen_li_comics on AA)
  • Size: 113 TiB in 2637 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 44 GiB
  • Last torrent: c_2790000.torrent [4]
  • 2,415,822 files
  • avg 49 MiB per file
• fiction (libgen_li_fic on AA)
  • Size: 1.7 TiB in 1262 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 31 GiB
  • Last torrent: f_3462000.torrent [5]
  • 1,262,005 files
  • avg 1.5MB per file
• russian-language fiction (libgen_li_fiction_rus on AA) — provided by libgen.li, but originating anywhere else. By the size of it looks like a Flibusta dump and something else
  • Size: 2 TiB in 2 torrent files
• magazines (libgen_li_magazines on AA)
  • Size: 46 TiB in 1358 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 31 GiB
  • Last torrent: m_1362000.torrent [6]
  • 1,328,836 files
  • avg 34.6 MiB per file
• standards (libgen_li_standarts on AA) — mostly soviet and russian construction standards, some BS and ISO/IEC documents
  • Size: 1.9 TiB in 999 torrent files
  • Average torrent size: 1.9 GiB
  • Last torrent: s_998000.torrent [7]
  • 998,563 files
  • avg 2 MiB per file

Database dumps

Database dumps can be downloaded from:

• https://data.library.bz/dbdumps/ - automatically generated

The repository (the actual .pdf/.epub/.djvu files) can be downloaded from:

• https://libgen.rs/repository_torrent/ - sci-tech, torrent
• https://libgen.rs/fiction/repository_torrent/ - foreign fiction, torrent
• https://libgen.rs/scimag/repository_torrent/ - scimag, torrent (last update: 2021-11-14)
• http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_nzb/ - sci-tech, usenet (403 Forbidden)

Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub stores papers in Library Genesis as secondary repository. The repository torrents can be downloaded from:

• https://libgen.rs/scimag/repository_torrent/

The database is available together with the others under /dbdumps/.

Since November 2021 Library Genesis "Classic" does not update it's Sci-Hub repository

Torrent structure

Non-fiction torrents

Each torrent contains at most 1000 files, filename of each file is its MD5 checksum in lower case (see also article^{[IA•Wcite•.today•MemWeb]} par. 23 for internals description). Internal LibgenID integer number of the book is used to determine torrent file, e.g. file with LibgenID=1234567 belongs to r_1234000.torrent, torrents start at round thousands so far. Some files can be excluded from the generated torrents for various reasons, when it happens the torrent will contain less than a 1000 files.

Scimag torrents

Each torrent contains 100 ZIP files, each with 1000 PDFs distributed in directories by their DOI prefix, like:

Archive:  66400000/libgen.scimag66499000-66499999.zip
  Length      Date    Time    Name
---------  ---------- -----   ----
  6459290  09-18-2017 07:35   10.1109/cybconf.2017.7985822.pdf
   631217  09-17-2017 12:01   10.1109/dt.2017.8024325.pdf
...
  1047522  09-17-2017 12:02   10.1111/1365-2435.12984.pdf
   313688  09-18-2017 07:36   10.1111/1365-2478.12569.pdf
  4475172  09-17-2017 08:57   10.1111/1365-2656.12756.pdf
   630038  09-16-2017 12:00   10.11120/ened.2013.00008.pdf
...
   362678  09-17-2017 12:01   10.11124/JBISRIR-2016-2538.pdf
   286640  09-18-2017 07:32   10.1112/jlms%2Fjdw055.pdf
   613931  09-16-2017 11:59   10.1112/topo.12000.pdf
   176652  09-17-2017 08:58   10.1113/EP086344.pdf
  1624320  09-18-2017 07:31   10.1113/JP274736.pdf
  1325647  09-18-2017 07:32   10.1113/JP274837.pdf
   101628  09-16-2017 12:16   10.1113/JP275085.pdf
   472949  09-18-2017 07:35   10.1113/JP275114.pdf
   475696  09-16-2017 12:03   10.1113/JP275171.pdf
    36566  09-16-2017 12:14   10.1115/1.1410937.pdf
...
---------                     -------
972242341                     1000 files

Mirrors

There are various unofficial mirrors of libgen, such as Z-Library (formerly b-ok.org and bookfi.org domain names) and multiple fishing/spam sites copying libgen design.

Archival Status

The Library Genesis Seeding Project [8] is a group effort on Reddit with The-Eye.eu that aims to seed the entire Library Genesis non-fiction collection. Users are actively being recruited to help preserve the library by seeding any parts of the torrent collection they can (each torrent containing 1,000 books is about 10 GB).

Internet Archive has darked (hidden/unindexed) collections.

• scimag: up to 64000000-64099999
• foreignfiction: up to 1600000
• libgen: up to 2092000

February-March 2025 hosting outage

On 2025-02-13 alleged hosting provider for Library Genesis - URDN (as Epinatura LLC, AS207656) had unannounced all their IPv4 prefixes, followed (via , , ) by the message on their homepage.

Service to Library Genesis "Classic" (.rs, .is, .st) was restored on 2025-03-08.