This is the second part of my tutorial series How to Research Almost Anything. This series will teach you:
- How to download tutorials and course material from youtube, edx, and coursera.
- How to find almost any book with libgen and the gutenberg project.
- How to access almost any scientific article with sci-hub, unpaywall, and the openaccess button.
In this post I'm going to show you how to access the world's greatest libraries of books. I'm fortunate enough to live in Boston and have access to both the Boston Public Library and the Harvard library and I still frequently use the resources that I'm about to show you.
Project Gutenberg is an attempt to catalog and distribute every book that is no longer under copyright and now within the public domain. It has novels like Melville's Moby Dick, and poems by Dickenson in a wide variety of digital formats. With over 56,000 free ebooks all published before 1923 Project Gutenberg is a veritable archive of works that have fallen into the public domain. (Though double check which version you receive. I once accidentally read the abridged version of Crime and Punishment!)
If Project Gutenberg is the stereotypical stuffy librarian that extoles the classics, libgen is the punk librarian trying to set the establishment on fire. You can find almost any popular book on there in a wide variety of formats. There's only one catch: you can't legally share almost anything you get from libgen.
Why is this? Well, copyright law in the United States only forbids unlawful distribution of copyrighted materials. It doesn't forbid receiving those unlawfully distributed, copyrighted materials.
This means that libgen is assuming a huge amount of liability in sharing these books with you but unless you start sharing them too you haven't broken any laws.
Now I am not a lawyer. I may be wrong about this. Maybe there's some lawyer out there who agrees or disagrees with me. If any lawyer out there would like to follow up on this further please let me know.
To use libgen just search via title, author, or ISBN. I'm sure you'll find something if it's not too esoteric.
This has been a part of my How to Research Almost Anything tutorial series. Check out the links below and be sure to follow me @timothystiles on twitter to get updates about my latest posts!
- How to download tutorials and course material from youtube, edx, and coursera.
- How to find almost any book with libgen and the gutenberg project.
- How to access almost any scientific article with sci-hub, unpaywall, and the openaccess button.
P.S If you've got anything to add please feel free to submit an issue or a pull request!
how-to-research-almost-anything © by Timothy Stiles
how-to-research-almost-anything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You should have received a copy of the license along with this work. If not, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.