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
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
Revolt.chat
ill check it out ty for the suggestion
zulip too (similar)
The backend is so janky that you are embarrassed to release it? I’m all for free knowledge but that is concerning.
when i mean janky it does and serves its purpose but my code isnt cleaned up and theres alot of redundant code - im currently doing a rewrite and when that is done i will release it
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
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
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”.
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
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
people are giving you way too much grief about other things, but you are most definitely monetizing the site.
ive made nothing from the advertisement on the home page - instead we were donated a server by snowcore to act as our proxy and caching server. No monetary gain has come from the advertisement and the storage server is paid out of pocket since we havent gotten much donations yet
my mistake. carry on.
nw i was just explaining lol
This is giving me Fed vibes
Fed as in?
I’m new to Lenny and wouldn’t mind learning the lingo.
I think they means it’s a federal operation, a honey pot for a government to crack down on piracy.
In the piracy world, “fed” is short for Federal Bureau of Investigation police officer.
Federal agent.
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
Probably because you use a lot of proprietary platforms like discord, reddit, github, twitter and you have apparently very bad opsec. If someone would do something illegal, they wouldnt be so careless about it. Thats the assumption probabyl
our whole model is to be easily self hostable and open source - just like movie-web (who had devs openly showing their names and faces ect in their github profiles) as for my bad opsec im just a hobbyist developer who is contributing to an open source project for fun - nothing else can be proven
This thread alone would likely prove enough already.
its all circumstantial evidence
Looks cool. I will take a look when the backend is open sourced for sure. Prep for some tough times legally if you continue to use those centralized social platforms.
we will be moving off discord soon
No you won’t you just voted harshly against it.
What about github? With all the more open git alternatives, why pick the code management tool hosted and controlled by Microsoft for open source / piracy?
we will be moving to codeberg soon
I personally find weird the read on web mechanism.
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.
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!
nah no worries i just realised i might have come off as hostile lmao 😁 ty for the support
btw the frontend is all open source - the backend will be open source in a month or two after the reqwrite
If it isn’t open source now you shouldn’t say it’s open source. You should say it’s partially open source with plans to get the rest out soon.
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
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
you can download the textbook here https://dl.bookracy.ru/download/8d4745279f239f2b7c8fac8d41d714e2/God i norsk 1 .pdf
Thanks for working on that, got it now.
nw
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
why github and not codeberg?
project started a few months ago idk we started on github but I will host a repo on codeberg soon
Glad to see this initiative. A genuine question: isn’t this redundant with Annas Archive?
annas archive doesnt have fast downloads for free users - downloads take around a good 30 mins for a decently sized books
bookracy aims to fix this issue
Thx for clarifying! I usually don’t notice that bc I always use the external downloads. It would be rly cool to see bookracy in the external downloads of Annas Archives then!
also pls keep your humour, it’s funny to see the libs get mad bc they see a “Russian Federation” tag
lmaoo ty yeah i genuinely dont understand the hate 😭 yeah annas archive soon come 😊
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
Always excited to see a new project like this. I would def move away from reddit and Github. Both have a track record of going after piracy projects. Reddit used to be safe but they are going full hammer rn. Github seems to be fine unless its too obvious its piracy. Discord is still safe.
Ty for the support Discord is still risky and so is github so we are aiming to move soon.
deleted by creator
Btw the discord link does not work, I would also suggest using Bluesky rather than twitter.
