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.
