Useful Site #1

Library Genesis: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

The first useful site I chose to discuss is Library Genesis. It is a search engine for articles and books. You can search by a multitude of fields, but I find the ability to search by ISBN particularly useful. The legality of the site is questionable, as it has been accused of promoting piracy, but as of yet there have been few legal consequences for the owners. I used the site to download PDFs for all of my books for this semester while I waited for the physical copies to be delivered.

The website is useful because it provides free download of information that should arguably be in the public domain. I'm not going to get too into the moral dilemma surrounding the free download of writings otherwise blocked behind a paywall, but I firmly believe that works publicly funded, or written by professors on a public payroll should be available for free. This site allows works to be downloaded via mirrors or torrent, but I wouldn't recommend torrenting anything, as that comes with its own set of security risks. Library genesis does post the hash values of all uploaded works, allowing you to check them for any malicious changes, and even allows one to search by the MD5 value.

I would definitely recommend this website for anyone who either can't afford books for school or needs fast access to a book while they are waiting on a physical copy or E-book. I can't say that there aren't risks involved with the website, as it is a Russian website with no secure connection option, but on the other hand, no sign in is required, so as long as proper precautions are taken with the files themselves, there shouldn't be much issue. I only recently learned about the existence of this website, and this is my last semester in school for the foreseeable future, so I don't know if I'll ever need it again, but I wish I had known of it when starting my academic career.