The launch of a new EBook or a Text Book torrent tracker is always exciting news. Although there are several private trackers that are focused on tracking E-Learning content, there has always been room for more sites with similar content. It looks almost as if the gap left by TextbookTorrents a couple of years back is still left open. Torrent My Books (TMB) is a new site that could probably fill this gap – the site aims to index electronic versions of books and text books all in one place. Unlike most torrent sites we feature on this blog, TMB is not a private tracker. It’s rather a public torrent index which does not operate a BitTorrent tracker - .torrent files are hosted on TMB but it users external trackers (such as OpenBitTorrent or TPB trackers) to facilitate the downloads.

Launched on the 1st of Septemeber, TMB is a brand new entrant to the BitTorrent community. The site’s official description of itself (as mentioned in the FAQ page) is “Torrent My Books is a torrent search engine and indexer for all things relating to books. Our goal is to become the number one source for providing users with an endless supply of digital books”.

Although it hasn’t even been a week since the site’s launch, TMB has managed to pile up around 200 torrents, some of these packs and collections. The site appears to index a variety of books ranging from science, business, arts, chemistry, physic, mathematics, programming and even fiction and some comics. A screenshot showing several of the indexed torrents can be seen below:

As mentioned earlier this is a public tracker. The site supports both standard downloads as well as magnet links. Registration is not mandatory to download or upload torrents. Additionally, users are not bound by ratio requirements or hit and run policies (although it’s recommended that you seed back what you download).

Site Name: Torrent My Books (http://torrentmybooks.com/)

Signup URL: http://torrentmybooks.com/register.php (Optional)

Twitter Feed: http://twitter.com/torrentmybooks

Related Articles

• eBookVortex, ElbitZ & Free The Textbooks – 3 E-Learning Trackers Open For Signup

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During the past few months, we featured at least two full alternatives to the now defunct TextBook Torrents tracker; Free The Textbooks and PureTorrents. Unfortunately, one of these sites (Free The Textbooks) hasn’t shown a lot of improvements – FTT  seems to have lost some torrents and there are hardly any new torrents being added to the tracker. Performance of PureTorrents on the other hand has been the complete opposite – during the past four months the tracker has added over 7000 torrents and attracted several thousand new members. In addition the site underwent some UI changes and several usability enhancement features too have been added.

When we first reviewed PureTorrents back in April 2009, the site only had 1200 torrents and 175 members. Now in August 2009, it tracks over 8200 active torrents and has a user base in excess of 4200 members. To put it short, PT is one of the largest academic/educational books trackers currently in existence.

Expanding the torrent and users databases is not all what PureTorrents has been doing in the past couple of months. They’ve added several new features too. The somewhat less user-friendly torrent index has got a facelift and now detailed information on each indexed book along with a book cover thumbnail is displayed. In addition, a new version of PTSort (a mod that can automatically extract book information from Amazon) is also due to be introduced soon (preview of this can be seen here).

If you are someone who is worried about having to maintain a mandatory ratio on a torrent site, here is some good news – PureTorrents does not have tough policies on user ratio requirements. Following is quoted from the homepage:

We field a lot of questions from members worried about their ratio.  You do not have to worry about your ratio.  We understand that as a book site, the chances that other people are going to want the same things as you are relatively small.  For the time being, we'd just like to see things better seeded and get some more content.

PureTorrents is without a doubt a great resource for students and professionals looking for electronic versions of educational and academic books (not just text books). Signups are currently open and you may register an account for free.

Site Name: PureTorrents (http://puretorrents.org)

Signup URL: http://puretorrents.org/account-signup.php

IRC Channel: irc://irc.puretorrents.org/PureTorrents

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Over the past month or so, several new text book trackers have joined the BitTorrent scene. Initially we featured PureTorrents, a new textbook/academic torrent site that’s registered some rapid growth. Then a few days ago we introduced you to Bibliotik – a new library tracker with text books, ebooks and more. Today we are going to talk about Free The Textbooks, a fairly new site for college texts, coursework, exam papers, etc. Slowly but surely, these sites are slowly beginning to fill the large gap left behind by the demise of Textbook Torrents, world’s largest textbook tracker at one point.

A short intro to Free the Textbooks! is given via the following notice, which is posted on site homepage:

Making the large scale theft of exam papers and textbooks so much easier. It might take a while, but we intend to become the biggest educational file sharing site full stop. You can help us by seeding.

Although this is a fairly new start up tracker just a few months old, it already has close to 1500 torrents indexed. There are both public and private torrents indexed – torrents tracked by FreetheTextbook’s own BitTorrent tracker as well as external torrents tracked by public trackers such as that of TPB’s. Obviously, ratio is calculated only for internal, private torrents.

The content on this tracker mainly comprises of text books, coursework, exam papers, children’s books, documentaries, lectures etc (see categories below for more information). The screenshot below captures some of the torrents indexed on Free The Textbooks!:

Although the content is pretty good, Free the Textbooks definitely needs more users; most of the indexed torrents have 1 seeder. This is a common problem for more new Bittorrent sites and hopefully this will be rectified as the tracker gains more popularity over time.

Registrations for Free The Textbooks! is currently open. If you are interested in text books/academic material, check this site out.

Site Name: Free the Textbooks (http://www.freeetextbooks.com)

Signup URL: http://www.freeetextbooks.com/account-signup.php

Categories:

• Childrens' Books - Colouring Books - Learning Books
• Coursework - A Level - GCSE - IB - University
• Documentaries
• Exam Papers - A Level - Computing - GCSE - IB - IGCSE - KS!/KS2/KS3 - Miscellaneous - O Level
• Lectures - Biology - Chemistry - Maths - Physics - Politics
• Textbooks - A Level - Accounting - Archaeology - Architecture - Art - Biology - Chemistry - College - Computer Science - Criminology - Economics - Education - Electronics - Engineering - English - Geography - Geology - History - IGCSE/GCSE/High School - KS1/KS2/KS3 - Languages - Law - Literature - Maths - Medicine - Miscellaneous - Music - Philosophy - Physics - Politics - Psychology - Religion
• Vocational - CBT

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Ever since I heard about Bibliotik about 3-4 months ago, I’ve been visiting the site at least once a week to see if it had been launched. Initially I was even able to create an account there as registrations were open long before official launch. Then the beta was closed to the public and no visible improvements could be seen for the next few months. I even wondered if the project had been abandoned - how very wrong I was! Bibliotik has finally gone live after a long beta testing phase and it’s been well worth the wait. The end result is a one of a kind BitTorrent tracker that combines Magazines, textbooks, ebooks, comics, audiobooks, journals and even scholarly articles.

It’s only been a week since Bibliotik has officially gone online and there is already an impressive amount of 250 active torrents indexed. More torrents are being added every day. From what it looks like, the site runs on a heavily modified Gazelle source. Whatever it is, the interface and layout just works – it navigates faster, presents a lot of detailed information on the indexed torrents and integrates additional features such as Collections (something similar to packs – it groups related torrents together), Requests, Authors, Artists and Publishers. Oh and note that this is a project by the same crew behind the popular classic movies tracker Cinematik – they sure do know how to run a BitTorrent site.

Once Bibliotik grows into a decent size, the need for several trackers for comics, educational content, audiobooks and text books will be eliminated. Also, the BitTorrent scene has been needing a magazines tracker for so long – Bibliotik somewhat fills this gap too. To get a better idea on the content on this site, see the screenshot below (also note the amazing detail of indexed torrents):

And now the burning question - how does one get into this tracker? It’s currently closed for public registrations but getting a Bibliotik account is not that hard. Currently there are 3 different ways to do this:

1. Via the recruitment thread on Cinematik – Over the course of the last few months FILEnetworks Blog has given away over 525 invites to Cinematik tracker in our invitation giveaways section. If you have an account at Cinematik, read this thread and send a PM to the specified user with your email address saying you want a Bibliotik invite!
2. Via the IRC invites channel – You should be familiar with IRC invite channels by now and the good news is that Bibliotik has one. The channel name is #bibliotik-invites on IRC server irc.brokensphere.net.
   Direct Link: irc://irc.brokensphere.net/bibliotik-invites
   If you are an IRC noob, read this article.
3. Via the recruitment thread on What.CD – The popular music tracker What.CD hosts a recruitment thread to Bibliotik in their popular Invites section in the forums.

Whatever you do, make sure you specify your E-mail correctly (“IF WE DONT GET AN EMAIL ADDRESS we WILL IGNORE YOU! (Same goes for you suckers who spell Bibliotik wrong.”) ). Good Luck!

Site Name: Bibliotik (http://bibliotik.org/)

Categories:

• Applications
• Articles
• Audiobooks
• Comics
• Ebooks
• Journals
• Magazines

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• PureTorrents – Download text book torrents and academic eBooks
• Gigapedia – E-Book download site (RapidShare, FileFactory, MegaShare Links)
• AnimaTooniC Tracker – Download Anime, Cartoon and Comic Torrents – Free Invites
• Comic Torrent Tracker (CTT) – Download comics for free
• 6 sites you can use to download fiction, novels and other E-Books free of charge

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I hope you can still remember Textbook Torrents – a private torrent tracker that specialized in educational text books. Unfortunately, Textbook torrents had to shut down in 2008 due to the owner receiving legal threats from authorities. Although there have been many other excellent E-book and E-learning torrent trackers around (Elbitz, eBookVortex (Open), Learnbits, Zinebytes, Docs.Torrents.Ro, etc), none of these were true replacements for Textbook torrents. If you are one of those souls who still miss Textbook torrents, here is some good news – try PureTorrents.

PureTorrents is a new private torrent tracker that specializes in academic books. A good description of the site is posted on the homepage - parts of it is quoted below:

First of all, this is a book-only tracker with a largely academic emphasis.  Our aim is to keep junk out and provide books that are high quality in terms of their content and readability (preferably both).  You may have noticed that all of our torrents have a very specific naming scheme.  We use custom software to standardize the filenames of books that are released here.  If it is your intention to become a content supplier (uploader) at some point, you will have to apply the same standards to your work.

A quick note about ratios...  While we don't encourage "hit and runs", this tracker is primarily about making knowledge available, not having the best ratio being an exclusive site.  So please seed if you can, after all, most people do.

Although the site is very new, it definitely looks promising. It currently track close to 1200 torrents out of which 140+ were added today. Puretorrents currently has around 175 members – expect these numbers to rise as the site gains more popularity.

As for the content, there are lots of academic E-Books related to a wide range of subjects on this tracker. Torrents are not organized into specific categories (only two categories are available in browse torrents page - scene releases and user uploads). Instead, PureTorrents seems to use a tagging feature – check the ‘browse tags’ page to search for books by subject.

As of 3/4/2009, PureTorrents is open for public registrations. The site is well worth checking out if you are looking to download academic E-books/text books/study guides, etc.

Site Name: PureTorrents (http://puretorrents.org)

Signup URL: http://puretorrents.org/account-signup.php

Credit to skindoggi on TPS for finding this one.

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We usually bring you good news on new torrent trackers launching or existing trackers opening sign ups, but this time around we have some bad news. World’s largest textbook torrent tracker has shut down and it ain’t coming back, according to the admin ‘Geekman’.

Textbook torrents was probably the only site of its kind; a torrent tracker dedicated to tracking thousands of text books on a wide range of subjects . This was what Geekman posted several months back when we first posted about the tracker and mistakenly called it an ‘E-Learning tracker’:

Okay, I really have to say this. Textbook Torrents is not an e-learning/documentary tracker. It is textbook-only. From the site rules:
"A basic rule of thumb to determine if something is acceptable: if you can find it in the courses section of your local university bookstore, it's fair game."
Thanks for the publicity, though. We get a steady trickle of redirects from this post. ;)

From humble beginnings, Textbook Torrents rose to popularity during mid 2008. This of course caught the eye of book publishers who apparently did not know how file sharing worked. Textbook Torrent’s host was threatened and the site went down suddenly as the host terminated the services offered to the site. It however soon resurfaced with a different host much to the joy of site members.

Now, in October 2008, Textbook torrents has shut down its doors for good. Site admin, whose identity was not a secret unlike that of many other tracker admin’s, had no other choice  than to shut the site down since book publishers were going to personally sue him for assisting copyright infringement. Textbook Torrents had more than 100000 registered members at the time it shut down and the loss would no doubt be felt strongly.

Currently, we can’t think of another tracker which can replace Textbook Torrents. There will however be new Textbook trackers popping up soon after this shutdown, in true hydra style. Whether the new entrants can rise as high as Textbook Torrents remains to be seen. For now all we can say to Geekman is, “Thanks for the past 2 years and thanks for helping people share - R.I.P. Textbook Torrents”.

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