There are a few rules that you are expected to adhere to when requesting books. It can be quite a bit of work to track down books so please put in the effort to follow these rules when making a request:
Adhere to all site rules, don't cause drama, be respectful of others, don't give spoilers for books, and don't criticise other's choice in books
Don't like that particular book? Nobody asked. Move along.
Please check the existing libraries first
Specifically LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-Library (if you have access).
This will save your time and mine.
One request per post
This helps me keep track of what I have done and what I need to do next.
If you make a list of books then I'm going to need to open up a word document and work between your post, the document, and all of the sources I'm digging through simultaneously which increases the overall effort and mental energy it requires
Don't abbreviate
Full book titles, full author names (as they are written on their books - I don't expect you to go on wikipedia to discover if some author has a middle name they don't use.)
If the author uses initials on their books (e.g. George R. R. Martin, James S. A. Corey), please use initials too. If a book has a subtitle, please provide that.
Specify your preferred format in the title by putting it in square brackets e.g. [Audiobook] or [PDF]
Square brackets are strongly preferred as some book titles use parentheses so square brackets makes it visually distinct.
Note that I will endeavour to get the book in your preferred format however this is not always possible so you may need to handle conversions yourself. If you want more than one format, you can put the desired formats in parentheses in the same post.
If you get your requested book, please edit your post title
Let myself and others know if you have gotten a response from me with your requested book by appending FULFILLED to the end of your post.
This will allow me to see at a glance which books I still need to look for and it signals to other users that this book is available.
Please only request audiobooks where you have checked that there is a professionally-released version available
If you don't check this first, then there's a good chance I'm going to waste my time trying to track down a non-existent audiobook.
Don't spam book requests
If the book wasn't available on the piracy scene last week, chances are that it won't be there this week either. Be patient. I will go back through old requests periodically to see if they are available on the piracy scene.
For textbooks, please specific the edition you are seeking and provide the ISBN
Textbook authors are painfully unimaginative with titles and often they write multiple books with the same title and it has the same author so an ISBN helps me to distinguish between different book options.
I will endeavour to get the correct edition however if I cannot, I will provide you with the nearest possible edition I can find - often there is very little variation that occurs between editions as this is a publishing scam to choke out the textbook reselling market.
For book requests that are non-English
Being outside the Latin alphabet gets tricky for me as navigating and identifying downloads in a very unfamiliar language is hard, but I'll do my best.
If you provide the title and author in the Latin alphabet as well as its native alphabet (where applicable), occasionally this can yield successes.
Providing the ISBN can make a very big difference in how successful I am at obtaining non-English works.
Are you interested in a book request that someone else has made?
If so, please leave a short comment requesting that you be notified if the book is made available. I will reply to your comment if I can get the book so you will be notified of this.
PDFs with OCR
OCR is notoriously bad in PDFs, especially older ones. There's very little chance that I'll be able to find a decent OCRed version of a PDF unless there are multiple copies of the same book available in the piracy scene, which isn't that common.
PDFs can be OCRed manually but it requires a lot of effort to do so, often hours of painstaking work, and I do not have the capacity to do this for you (except in the case where it is a work of significant importance to revolutionary theory or history, where you might be able to convince me to take on the task of OCRing the work.)
If I provide you with the wrong book or there is an error in the book that makes it unreadable
Let me know by pinging me. It would take a lot of time to double-check that every linked book is actually functioning as normal and that it is the correct upload. Mistakes happen, just let me know the issue and I'll go hunting again.
I am able to rip ebooks from The Internet Archive
You are welcome to request books that are only available on the Internet Archive but not on the other libraries listed above. I will rip the book and make it available for you.
Some books do not have an official ebook release but they can still be available on the piracy scene
This especially applies to older books. You are welcome to request but know that there's less likelihood of someone having scanned the book themselves and uploaded it.
Often books like this have a large filesize and the scanning work is not of high quality but there isn't much that can be done about this.
Audiobook narrator preference can be included in your request
I will endeavour to find your preferred narrator but there's a likelihood that you'll have to make do with what I manage to find.
Audiobooks will be hosted on TankieTube
There's the possibility for CatBox to store the audiofiles but the upload limitations can be prohibitive and it requires a lot of effort to edit an audiobook down - I don't have the capacity to do this. If you want the audio file uploaded to CatBox, let me know and if the filesize permits I will upload it there.
To listen to audiobooks on TankieTube via Android, consider GrayJay if you want to turn your screen off or your mobile browser is struggling with it
For more info, see this post
If such a case does come up, hit me up--I'd love to help, and mind-numbing detail-oriented work is my jam.
I don't think I'll need your services since I'm usually able to find anything I need, but it's really cool that you're offering this!
That's so cool, thanks for letting me know!
I might make a list when I get around to fleshing out the sidebar because there are now three of us OCR-ers here, which doesn't sound like a lot but after I made this comment the other day, it's kind of a different story.
I actually don't mind doing the OCR work either but I need to lock in to do it and it depends on what else is going on in my life. The last thing I wanted to do was to end up with like 20 or 50 PDFs all awaiting OCR work because I was too generous in what I offered to this comm.
I was going to comment about making epubs too!
If a book fits comlib I might be willing to make an EPUB of it.
(Also still from prisons to educational institutions, whish it had been translated)
I know that Lady Izdihar has a repository of rare mostly-soviet texts that she manually scans and turns into PDFs which would benefit from being turned into epubs. I'm wondering if I made a post that listed all of the files available and where to find them, then left it as an open request for this epub troika that is starting to form so we can take all take a shot at turning some of these works into more accessible formats when the motivation to tackle a job emerges. Fortunately they are almost all pamphlets so it's not as big of a task as taking on a whole book.
What are your thoughts?
Oh yeah! I remember digging for this Vyshinsky work. I'm glad you mentioned it, I'm just trying something out - it's not a translation but it might get you closer to accessing the info.
How does a podcast episode grab you?
Sounds cool!
More interested in the book itself.
I totally misread your comment. I should focus. I can't get my hands on a translated version of the book, still. If you want I can upload an OCR Russian-language version of the PDF and you can upload it to NotebookLM to quiz google's NotebookLM AI (which is suprisingly decent) on the contents of the book. That's about as close as you're going to get to reading it without a translator or a lot of Russian lessons.
I'll just continue wishing.
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RE epub troika: the most time consuming part of making an EPUB is proofreading OCRed text. If you or anyone else would be willing of help me by proofreading, I can do the actual EPUB making (I know HTML so I make them "manually" or whatever you want to call it, it allows me to have great control over how they look, compared to using WYSIWYG programs—at least I think).