Ok so we all love a hyperfixation but does anyone else ever avoid certain things because you feel like you don’t have the time to be fixated on that, or that you aren’t in the right headspace for this to become your latest obsession
ok since i’ve guided people through using libgen a few times now, i’ll make a post about it. it’s super easy actually, i just think the interface intimidates people.
the interface isn’t as nice as z-lib’s but i honestly find it easier to get around libgen, i guess because i’ve been using it longer. so don’t get intimidated
here’s the search, self-explanatory. you really don’t have to change anything under “libgen search options” unless you wanna see everything available from a specific author, publisher, series, etc. i don’t actually know what “the column set default” means and that has never prevented me from finding what i need lol.
the non-fiction/sci-tech and fiction categories are exactly what they sound like…sort of. i’ve found that if i’m looking for creative nonfiction (e.g. a memoir), i’m more likely to find it under “fiction” than “non-fiction/sci-tech”. poetry books are under “fiction” as well.
now let’s search. mike davis died recently and i’m interested in checking out his books, so i’m going to search for his book city of quartz: excavating the future in los angeles, which is nonfiction. just “city of quartz” is a good search term, since it’s a pretty unique name for a book.
sorry if you can’t see this too well, i’ve taken a screenshot of a “mirrors” section to highlight it (i’ll get into that in a second) but this search results page is just a list of the files that fit my search. libgen lists the author, title, publisher, year, page count, language, file size, file extension (this is important if you’re picky like me–i like epubs for personal use, but when i was in grad school i needed pdfs to reference consistent page numbers). any information that isn’t available (e.g. some of the page counts here) will be blank. the mirrors are what you really want here.
books from libgen aren’t all torrents (usually a torrent link is AN OPTION but it’s an option i’ve never taken in this case, it’s easier for me to just download files directly), but if you’ve ever torrented anything, you’re probably familiar with the term “mirror” in this context. if not, a mirror is a copy of a file hosted on a given server. in other words, these three “mirrors” are just the same file hosted in three different places, if one doesn’t work, you can try another. i’ve actually never had an issue where i’ve had to check different mirror links, but because libgen’s mirror links are often from zlib, i imagine that’ll be different now.
anyway, you can either click one of the mirrors listed on the search page, or click title of the book, which will take you to a page like this, which also has a selection of mirrors:
the first three links are the most relevant to you if you’re not interested in downloading a torrent. again, these are the same file, just in different locations. so i’ll click “this mirror” and that’ll take me to the download page for the file hosted on this site. if you’d clicked #1 of the numbered mirrors for this particular version of city of quartz on the search results page, it’d be the same result
see that big “GET” link at the top? that’s the download link. just click it and the file will start downloading. boom. easy!
