DigitalDreamDoor by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ahh, this brings good memories of Ciro Santilli's musical formative teenage years scouring the web for the best art humanity had ever produced in certain generes. And it still is a valuable resource as of the 2020's!
cat-v.org by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
cat-v.org/ by Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, looong time Unixer, and some kind of leader of a 9p resurrection cult. That one's spicy. E.g.: harmful.cat-v.org/, Ciro's version: good and evil.
You can borrow online books from them for a few hours/days: help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016554912-Borrowing-From-The-Lending-Library This is the most amazing thing ever made!!! You can even link to specific pages, e.g. archive.org/details/supermenstory00murr/page/80/mode/2up
They seem to a have a separate URL with the same content as well for some reason: openlibrary.org/, classic messy Internet Archive style.
Bastards are suing them www.theverge.com/2020/6/1/21277036/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-open-library-ebook-lending: Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins
It is quite hard to decide if an upload is from the official legal lending library, or just some illegal upload, e.g.:so the URLs are basically the same style. Some legality indicators:
archive.org/details/toomanyrequests_20191110 says 15 archives / minute, but apparently aslo 15 retrievals per minutes on Wikipedia, after which 5 min blacklist. After that, you start getting some 429s, and after that, server refuses to connect at al.
CDX: no limits apparently, they might just throttle you? Made 10k requets on bash loop and was going fine. But not that if you get blacklisted by create/fetch requests blacklist, server fails to connect here as well.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact