A new electronic library, Library Genesis, has appeared in the Internet.  Its main address is http://gen.lib.rus.ec/, there’s also an additional address http://libgen.in/.  The interface is in Russian and in English.  The library is intended mainly for academic and technical literature, reference books and educational materials, but some fiction can be found there as well.  By now, some 840 thousand books are available at the library, collections of several other e-libraries have been imported into it, including the Gigapedia.org (Library.nu) that was closed several months ago.

The interface of Library Genesis is quite simple and rather convenient.  On the home page there’s a search form where you can type the title of a book, an article, a journal or a book series, the author’s or publisher’s name, the date of publishing, the language, ISBN or even the MD5 hash of the file you are looking for.  There’s also a subject catalogue (the Topics link); if you find there a separate section for the field of knowledge you are interested in, it can make the search much more simple.  The search results are displayed in a convenient table form: the author, title, publisher, year, language, the size and format of the file, links for downloading and a link for editing the catalogue card.  To see the card, click on the document title; there one can usually find an annotation and a scan of the cover.  Books can be downloaded without any registration, it’s necessary only to edit the catalogue.  Pages may be displayed with a lag.

Theoretically all the books available at the library can be downloaded from four different mirrors; each document in the search results has four links for downloading.  In practice, some of the links usually don’t work, and downloading is often rather slow.  Errors while downloading are also possible.

One more interesting feature is that you can bookmark the page with the search results.  Then, if you visit it again later, you will be able to see the new books that correspond to your request.

For the Russian scholars, the appearance of Library Genesis will be an especially pleasant news, taking into account the current shortcoming of foreign literature at the libraries and bookshops.  One can long talk about an intellectual property and condemn the piracy, but the Internet, by its nature, is intended for a free exchange of information; to oppose it is the same as to try to sell the air.