Web Musings: August 2012

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Over 1,000,000 Torrents of Downloadable Books, Music, and Movies | Internet Archive Blogs

Dressed to Kill, 1946

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow).

Night of the Living Dead, 1968 Torrent Link at the bottom of download box.

To download the Torrent of the files in the item, click the Torrent link at the bottom of the download box; your Torrent client (such as transmission and uTorrent) can use the Torrent file you get to download the files in the Archive item, including the original item files, plus all derivative and metadata files. Individual files can be selected (or deselected) from the list within most BitTorrent clients, allowing Torrents to be used to retrieve an entire item or a specific subset of files within it.

Gulliver's Travels, 1939

BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.

Sex Madness, 1938

To upload files to the Internet Archive, please use
http://archive.org/upload or http://archive.org/create.

We are starting to track some BitTorrent statistics, which can be fun to watch.

“I supported the original creation of BitTorrent because I believe in building technology to make it easy for communities to share what they have. The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn’t just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive,” said John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Thank you, BitTorrent community, for evolving such a valuable technology for the rapid,

New Riders of the Purple Sage 1973 Concert Recording

reliable, and resilient distribution of large numbers of files! And to Aaron Ximm, here at the Internet Archive, for helping the Internet Archive’s patrons and, we hope, libraries and archives worldwide to distribute public materials quickly, efficiently, and inexpensively.

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