Hey everyone! 📚 I’m excited to introduce Bookracy, an open-source shadow library dedicated to preserving and freely sharing knowledge. With a large and growing collection, Bookracy is (annoying) ad-free, non-profit, and lightning-fast ⚡—plus, it’s fully open-source and powered by a passionate community. Whether you’re a reader, researcher, or developer, there’s a place for you here. Check out our Reddit, website, GitHub, and hop into our Discord to join the conversation and help grow this movement for open access! 🤝❤️
Note: Author requested permission to post this.
ty i forgot to clarify❤
Since you’re maintaining a subreddit, you might want to create a comm in lemmy as well. Reddit has already taken down other piracy subs like GenP
yeah sure a little help on getting started would be great but ill get to it
putting aside the obvious glowie talk someone else raised, you should really, really reconsider your opsec. And I mean, really. Using discord to communicate? And spamming Reddit, from a non-dedicated account, no less? Posting PII to justify downtimes? If this gets any traction at all, you’re in deep shit. There’s a good reason Anna is as anonymous as she is. Cat is out of the bag at this point, I’d recommend shutting it down. You could always continue developing the code for it, the frontend looks pretty good. But please, reconsider if you have the dedication and knowledge it takes to run a shadow library and not be caught.
our model is just like the old movie-web, we are open source and if we are DMCA’d then we will take it down but our mirrors will still be up but i understand the opsec point and may move from discord to signal
that’s good and all, but as it stands now, it seems almost guaranteed your PII will leak. Are you okay to never set foot into a country that extradites to the US again?
Are you saying there is a way to escape my student loa*s forever?
My opsec doesn’t allow for any Russian projects at all
having a .ru domain is just precaution against takedowns - none of the devs are russian its just the west and russia dont get along so takedown requests for a .ru domain would be ignored by russia
Fair, at least as long as they’re not open-source
Tried downloading a book and it’s just giving an error saying it failed to download. Book name
God i norsk 1 - Tekstbok A1/A2 : norsk for voksne innvandrere
thanks for the heads up about the bug ill fix it asap content is still being torrented and another 1mill books will be added to the collection in a few days so for larger files like these it may be in that collection
This is giving me Fed vibes
i can assure you this isnt a fed op lmao. idk how i can convince you maybe check out the github and check out the devs? some devs are from other big projects like movie-web ect that got taken down.
plus downloads arent hidden behind registration, and we are addnig accounts in the future but its going to be mullvad style - a 12 digit unique identifier so privacy wise theres nothing tying you to the downloads except your ip, which we also dont save so you are fine
Fed as in?
I’m new to Lenny and wouldn’t mind learning the lingo.
In the piracy world, “fed” is short for Federal Bureau of Investigation police officer.
I think they means it’s a federal operation, a honey pot for a government to crack down on piracy.
Thanks, this sounds like a great project! Also, glad dbzer0 was your choice of a community :)
Is there an rogue date where you’ll release it to be open source?
Also, seeing you mentioned ad-free, i’m curious about this.
btw the frontend is all open source - the backend will be open source in a month or two after the reqwrite
i meant annoying ad free as in no redirect or popup ads - we still need a way to fund the project since donations are scarce
Understandable, apologies if it sounded like i found it annoying; i prefer it like this anyway :) was just curious about that point.
Thanks again for this great project!
Being “private” and having a discord is like an oxymoron.
I only see a front end on GitHub. Is this just a libgen mirror?
No its not a libgen mirror - we have our own collections and are torrenting from libgen + zlib aswell - and backend is going to be open sourced in the future once its finished and ready - right now the code is very janky and im too embarassed to release it lol. Theres still alot of additions to do to the backend and once that is done I will release.
We also have a telegram and signal group - the discord was just for my existing community who are primarily discord users aswell
Revolt.chat is a really solid alternative to Discord
btw you say “ad free” but I can see an ad in the home
Regarding the download speeds etc, also Anna’s archive was faster time ago but then the more you grow the more you have to take care
So my question is, are there any plans for scaling?
i said annoying ad-free i should have clarified i meant no popup or redirect ads - and yes there are plans for scaling and we have a few different services like you saw sponsoring the project aswell
For your sake, I’d strongly recommend not monetizing the site at all. Publishers will come after you if you make any sort of profit from the site especially if you’re located in a western country.
That’s one of the main reasons Nintendo took action against Yuzu - they were making a lot of money from Patreon.
we arent monetizing the site - we still need a way to fund the project and snowcore have kindly agreed to give use a bulletproof server that we use for caching and proxying between our storage server
all money ever donated or gained is invested back into the project - we arent making anything
Bit gross that it’s a RU domain though
there is a .org domain and a few other mirrors go check out https://rentry.co/bookracy the .ru domain is just us taking precautions against a takedown request
Looks like the GitHub also has its location set to Russian Federation too. 👀
lmaoo that was just for jokes - most of us are from western countries
I see you share Elon Musk’s sense of “humour”.
Why?
You really have to ask?
I was an idiot and read it as .ro for Romania. Of course I know about Russia and the war.
Still I also wouldn’t comment on people posting .com-links, even though the US are fighting endless illegal wars for decades and the president is wrecking democracy for a police state..com is not the cctld for the us, that would be .us
I know right.
I do not, care to explain?
im so lost…
.ru was for precautions against DMCA and the russian federation thing on github was just jokes because we had a ru domain
And why is it a problem to have a ru domain? Or is it just a russia bad thing?
well idrk im guessing some people have political reasons to dislike russia
A lot of pirated content sites are Russian. This just feels ignorant or racist.
Saw some good engineering textbooks on there too. Great job.
🖖 ty
Based. I’ll check it out and see if I can be of help on the development front. Been meaning to learn typescript
tysm we’ve got alot on the roadmap and are in need of devs
No thanksi didnt kno this would cause so much backlash 😭 we only set it as russian federation as jokes i can change it to north korea if you want it doesnt mean the project is from there
also anyone can register .ru domains, i got mine from cheapprivacy.ru where i paid in crypto - an .ru domain along with .su and .to are one of the best domains for piracy since they are very lax and ignore most takedown requests
They can ignore US copyright laws there.
Russia is one of the key destinations for piracy because of lenient laws and even more lenient police practice regarding it.
If you’re afraid of websites hosted in Russia, I have bad news for you regarding piracy.
All states are the enemy, borders are spooks, seek allies worldwide. Borders are not real, the imaginary scars of the owner class, erase them all.
Talk to Ukraine about borders
What’s happening in Ukraine sucks
That doesn’t contradict the sentiment that borders are generally arbitrary lines designed to divide us.
Using a Russian sure to get free books doesn’t hurt Ukraine unless these are all like infected with Russian turbo malware or something
And why a Twitter account?
the twitter was made by someone else on my team and isnt even used anymore
Not familiar with this. Does it mean that it’s Russian operated?
no having a .ru domain is just precaution for takedown requests - ive been in the piracy game for quite a while and the tld’s that are normally immune to takedown requests are .su .ru .to and .li I didnt know having a .ru domain would be this controversial and the github is only set to russian federation because of the .ru domain we have - if you check all the devs the times they are awake would all me western times
Is there any Upside over NexusSTC?
Is it decentralised?Is there any Upside over NexusSTC? Is it decentralised? bookracy has faster and unlimited downloads, lack of popup/redirect ads, and a more active community. also from my knowledge NexusSTC is more academic content whereas bookracy has more of a range of content
also no Bookracy is not decentralised - it operates on centralized servers much like LibGen ect. This means that while it’s open-source and community-driven, our infrastructure still relies on traditional hosting, which can be vulnerable to takedowns or disruptions. However we’ve taken precautions for this and have a bulletproof proxy server which also caches inbetween the storage server and client
Will you also share your collections via Torrents like LibGen and ZLib or contribute back to them?
yep im planning on setting up an ipfs node and torrents for our own collections are planned for the future
Awesome!
If it’s not decentralized then it’s vulnerable to takedowns. Why not decentralize it?
only the frontend is vunerable to takedowns - our backend server is proxied thro a bulletproof hosting provider (our sponsor snowcore) masking the ip of the storage server thus making it not vunerable to takedowns
decentralisation isnt the only way to be immune to takedowns theres many more but i get your point
