8 ms·

Wayback Machine Hits 400,000,000,000

300 points by tweakz 12y ago

alternize 12y ago
awesome! it's a great tool to go back in time to check out our past websites full of blinking gifs and whatnot. I didn't know that they also maintain the "HTTP Archive", showing website latency over time as well as some interesting live-statistics: http://httparchive.org/ http://httparchive.org/
- scott_karana 12y ago
  Thanks, it's nice to see factual data backing trends in web design. :)
- ersii 12y ago
  As far as I know, Internet Archive does not maintain "HTTP Archive" (http://httparchive.org/ http://httparchive.org/). HTTP Archive was founded by and is being maintained by Steve Souders (Chief Performance Officer at Fastly - http://www.fastly.com/ http://www.fastly.com/). He's previously held titles at both Google ("Head Performance Engineer") and Yahoo!. He's also a co-founder of the popular web-development debug add-on Firebug. Sources: http://httparchive.org/about.php http://httparchive.org/about.php and http://stevesouders.com/about.php http://stevesouders.com/about.php
  - alternize 12y ago
    from OPs linked article: June 15th, 2011 – The HTTP Archive becomes part of the Internet Archive [0], adding data about the performance of websites to our collection of web site content. [0] https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/15/http-archive-joins-with-internet-archive/ https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/15/http-archive-joins-with-...
    - ersii 12y ago
      Oh schucks, I completely missed that! Thanks for linking to it! It doesn't hurt to be wrong occationally, then you get to learn something.. :-)
TempleOSV207 12y ago
"My sins grieve my heavenly father." Speaking for other people. God is perfectly just. If you get punished, you're guilty.
Kenji 12y ago
Can anyone explain to me how displaying those sites on demand is not copyright infringement? I'm seriously curious, I don't know much about copyright laws.
- dvirsky 12y ago
  Not a lawyer, but I guess this probably falls under fair use, which includes (from the Wikipedia article) both search engine use, and library archiving of content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
  - karasinski 12y ago
    The Archive is also legally a library, which allows them to get away with a lot of things that companies cannot.
    - gwern 12y ago
      Also, doesn't the IA have specific privileges given it by Congressional legislation at some point? I seem to recall that coming up in abandonware discussions.
      - ivank 12y ago
        https://archive.org/about/dmca.php https://archive.org/about/dmca.php - it looks like the exemptions applied to everyone, for 3 years at least.
- shmerl 12y ago
  It should be fair use (non commercial, library purpose usage etc.).
meritt 12y ago
Has there been any High Scalability articles on their infrastructure? We have a similar need: storing a large volume of text-based content over a period of time, with versioning as well. On top of it we have various metadata. We're currently storing everything in MySQL -- a lightweight metadata row and a separate table for the large (~400KB on average) BLOB fields in a compressed table. We're looking at ways to improve our architecture: simply bigger+faster hardware? Riak with LevelDB as a backend? Filesystem storing with database for the metadata? We even considered using version control such as git or hg but that proved to be far too slow for reads compared to a PK database row lookup. Any HN'ers have suggestions?
- ddorian43 12y ago
  hypertable (store data and metadata in different access groups, basically different files on disk but in the same table) on top of QFS for distributed file system in reed-solomon replication(for ~more efficiency) you can keep n-versions(miscrosecond timestamps), sorted compressed data on disk for fast range reads, you can compress and group in blocks differently across access groups(access groups are just groups of columns) it was based on bigtable, which was written to store the crawling data(like you & waybackmachine?) for google search
- mmagin 12y ago
  I am a former Archive employee. I can't speak to their current infrastructure (though more of it is open source now - http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wayback/ http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wayback/ ), but as far as the wayback machine, there was no SQL database anywhere in it. For the purposes of making the wayback machine go: - Archived data was in ARC file format (predecessor to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_ARChive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_ARChive) which is essentially a concatenation of seperately gzipped records. That is, you can seek to a particular offset and start decompressing a record. Thus you could get at any archived web page with a triple (server, filename, file-offset) Thus it was spread across a lot of commodity grade machines. - An sorted index of all the content was built that would let you lookup (url) and give you a list of times or (url, time) to (filename, file-offset). It was implemented by building a sorted text file (first sorted on the url, second on the time) and sharded across many machines by simply splitting it into N roughly equal sizes. Binary search across a sorted text file is surprisingly fast -- in part because the first few points you look at in the file remain cached in RAM, since you hit them frequently. - (Here's where I'm a little rusty) The web frontend would get a request, query the appropriate index machine. Then it would use a little mechanism (network broadcast maybe?) to find out what server that (unique) filename was on, then it would request the particular record from that server. (Edit: FYI, my knowledge is 5 years old now. I know they've done some things to keep the index more current than they did back then.) At the very least, I'd think about getting your blobs out of MySQL and putting them in the filesystem. Filesystems are good at this stuff. You can certainly do something as simple as a SHA-1 hash of the content as the filename, and then depending on your filesystem's performance characteristics, you can have a couple levels in the tree you store them in. e.g. da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 goes into the directory da/39/ Then you stick da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 into the 'pointer' field in your table that replaces the actual data. Obviously this design assumes the content of _that_ file doesn't change. If you want to change the data for that row in the table, you have to write a new file in the filesystem and update the 'pointer'.
swalsh 12y ago
If you're looking to donate, they take bitcoin too! https://archive.org/donate/index.php https://archive.org/donate/index.php
sutro 12y ago
Nice work on this over the years, gojomo et al.
mholt 12y ago
Cool, but on a lot of sites (including some of my own, from 10+ years ago to recently) it doesn't get hardly any of the images. Am I the only one experiencing this?
- buren 12y ago
  If you're using AWS S3 check your resource policy
Vecrios 12y ago
I still cannot fathom how they are able to store huge amounts of data and not run out of space. Care anyone to explain?
- dwhly 12y ago
  From a conversation with Brewster a few years ago: The doubling of density of disk drives has allowed them to stay relatively neutral with respect to space for the Wayback machine. It still occupies approximately the same size as it has for the last 10 years, which is essentially a set of racks about 15-20 feet long altogether I think? However, the new TV news and search capability requires substantially more space than even the archive IIRC, or certainly is heading that way.
jackschultz 12y ago
Funny story about the Wayback Machine and how it helped me. I had let my blog go into disrepair for a couple months, and eventually, when I went back to it, I found that since I hadn't kept up with security updates, I wasn't able to access any of my old posts. When I went back to start writing again (this time using paid hosting so I didn't have to deal with that), I was disappointed that I wasn't going to have ~20-30 posts I had before. On a hunch, I checked the Wayback Machine and found that it had archived about 15 of my posts! Very excited that I could restore some of my previous writings.
rietta 12y ago
Wow, that's one billion more pages than there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot!
keenerd 12y ago
PSA/ranty thing: Just because something is archived in the Wayback machine, do not trust that archive.org will keep it there for all time. If you need something, make a local copy! A few months ago TIA changed their stance on robots.txt. They now retroactively honor robot blocks. Now any site can completely vanish from the archives. Let's say I died tomorrow. My family lets my domain slip. A squatter buys it and throws up a stock landing page, with a robots.txt that forbids spidering. TIA would delete my entire site from their index. I've already lost a few good sites to this sort of thing. If you depend on a resource, archive it yourself. edit - Official policy: https://archive.org/about/exclude.php https://archive.org/about/exclude.php If I am reading it properly, once blocked they never check later in case of a change of heart? No procedure for getting re-indexed at all?
- gojomo 12y ago
  A fair rant, but to correct some misperceptions: The retroactive application of robots.txt is not a new policy; it's been in place for at least 11 years, and I believe it arrived very soon after the Wayback Machine was first unveiled. An updated robots.txt does not irreversibly delete prior captures, so if the robots.txt changes again, access to previously-collected material can be re-enabled. This policy has served to minimize risk and automate the most common removal-scenario, when a webmaster wants a total opt-out of current crawling and past display. But, the collateral damage to unrelated content from prior domain-owners has grown as the web has aged, and more domains have changed hands. (The tradeoff that made sense in 2002 probably doesn't make sense in 2014.) Figuring out a system that can automate most legitimate exclusions, while rejecting or reversing those that lack a firm basis in content ownership or personal privacy, is a thorny task, but it would be worth pursuing if/when the Wayback Machine has the necessary staff resources. (My proposal since 2008 has been a DMCA-inspired 'put-back' procedure, where an original content owner can assert, formally, that they are the content owner and do not want the current-day robots.txt applied to captures before a certain date. Then, the current domain-owner would have to counter-notify that to maintain the block. This idea hasn't had legal review, but would reverse some current damage, and any bad-faith blockers would have to go on record with a false claim to maintain the block, potentially exposing them to a third-party legal challenge, with minimal risk to IA.)
leorocky 12y ago
And not one of those hits is from Quora due to their robots.txt: https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.quora.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.quora.com/ Good job Quora, preserving all that crowd sourced content away from the crowd, keeping it from everyone not logged in. Hats off to getting into YC so you can post your job openings on the HN home page and get some press. This doesn't add anything to your image though, it just takes a little away from YC. On another better note, a great big thank you to the wayback machine for all of the public good it does. Now there's an organization that is amazing and wonderful and enriching our lives in an open and honest way with information.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Man. I hate on Quora. Didn't realize they were YC. Shame.
  - khalidmbajwa 12y ago
    And why would you do that ? I can see why the must-register roadbloack is annoying in theory but It takes a few minutes to register, and then its an absolute gold-mine of knowledge, with an extra-ordinary community, which is very positive, constructive and helpful. I find it way more engaging than HN Actually to be honest.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      If you want to have your private answer community, that's fine. Don't go whoring it on Google and other search engines as if the results are publicly visible when they're not. I'm also opposed on principle to sites which require registration and (in theory if not in practice) log all of my interactions -- what I read and how I interact with it is very personal information and data. It's why I'm opposed to the idea of logging in to, say, read The New York Times. It's one of a very small number of sites I'd subscribe to, but even then I'd prefer to access it without logging in. I've created throwaway accounts a few times to see if there's anything sufficiently worthwhile there. I'm largely convinced that 1) there's not and 2) the dynamics of the site work against it scaling or surviving. So I'm not going to waste my time with it.
dredmorbius 12y ago
I'd like to rave about an underappreciated but absolutely brilliant piece of the Internet Archive's infrastructure: its book reader (called, I gather, "BookReader"). TIA includes copious media archives including video, audio, and books. The latter are based on full-image scans and can be read online. I generally dislike full-format reading tools: Adobe Acrobat, xpdf, evince, and other PDF readers all have various frustrations. Google's own online book reader is a mass of Web and UI frustrations. I'm a guy who almost always prefers local to Web-based apps. TIA's book reader is the best I've seen anywhere, hands down. It's fast, it's responsive. The UI gets out of the way. Find your text and hit "fullscreen". Hit 'F11' on your browser to maximize it, you can then dismiss the (subtle) UI controls off the page and you are now ... reading your book. Just the book. No additional crap. Page turn is fast. Zoomed, the view seems to autocrop to the significant text on the page. Unlike every last damned desktop client, the book remains positioned on the screen in the same position as you navigate forward or backward through the book. Evince, by contrast, will turn a page and then position it with the top left corner aligned. You've got to. Reposition. Every. Damned. Page. Drives me insane (but hey, it's a short trip). You can seek rapidly through the text with the bottom slider navigation. About the only additions I could think of would be some sort of temporary bookmark or ability to flip rapidly between sections of a book (I prefer reading and following up on footnotes and references, this often requires skipping between sections of a text). Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Reg8KLB.png http://i.imgur.com/Reg8KLB.png Source: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/mode/2up http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/... But, for whomever at TIA was responsible for this, thank you. From a grumpy old man who finds far too much online to be grumpy about, this is really a delight. This appears to be an informational page with more links (including sources): https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  Wow, I had no idea. If you'd have asked me where to read older texts I'd have said "Project Gutenberg." This is miles better.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
pimlottc 12y ago
A little known fact is that there is a mirror of the Wayback Machine hosted by [The Bibliotheca Alexandrina: http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.aspx http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.asp... I have sometimes had luck retrieving pages from this mirror that were unavailable (or returned errors) in the main site.
ultrasandwich 12y ago
> Before there was Borat, there was Mahir Cagri. This site and the track it inspired on mp3.com created quite a stir in the IDM world, with people claiming that “Mahir Cagri” was Turkish for “Effects Twin” and that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse by Richard D. James (Aphex Twin). (Captured December 29, 2004 and December 7, 2000) Okay this just blew my mind. Anyone else follow Aphex Twin's various shenanigans? Was this ever investigated further?

300 points by tweakz 12y ago

awesome! it's a great tool to go back in time to check out our past websites full of blinking gifs and whatnot. I didn't know that they also maintain the "HTTP Archive", showing website latency over time as well as some interesting live-statistics: http://httparchive.org/ http://httparchive.org/

scott_karana 12y ago
Thanks, it's nice to see factual data backing trends in web design. :)
ersii 12y ago
As far as I know, Internet Archive does not maintain "HTTP Archive" (http://httparchive.org/ http://httparchive.org/). HTTP Archive was founded by and is being maintained by Steve Souders (Chief Performance Officer at Fastly - http://www.fastly.com/ http://www.fastly.com/). He's previously held titles at both Google ("Head Performance Engineer") and Yahoo!. He's also a co-founder of the popular web-development debug add-on Firebug. Sources: http://httparchive.org/about.php http://httparchive.org/about.php and http://stevesouders.com/about.php http://stevesouders.com/about.php
- alternize 12y ago
  from OPs linked article: June 15th, 2011 – The HTTP Archive becomes part of the Internet Archive [0], adding data about the performance of websites to our collection of web site content. [0] https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/15/http-archive-joins-with-internet-archive/ https://blog.archive.org/2011/06/15/http-archive-joins-with-...
  - ersii 12y ago
    Oh schucks, I completely missed that! Thanks for linking to it! It doesn't hurt to be wrong occationally, then you get to learn something.. :-)

TempleOSV207 12y ago

"My sins grieve my heavenly father." Speaking for other people. God is perfectly just. If you get punished, you're guilty.

Kenji 12y ago

Can anyone explain to me how displaying those sites on demand is not copyright infringement? I'm seriously curious, I don't know much about copyright laws.

dvirsky 12y ago
Not a lawyer, but I guess this probably falls under fair use, which includes (from the Wikipedia article) both search engine use, and library archiving of content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
- karasinski 12y ago
  The Archive is also legally a library, which allows them to get away with a lot of things that companies cannot.
  - gwern 12y ago
    Also, doesn't the IA have specific privileges given it by Congressional legislation at some point? I seem to recall that coming up in abandonware discussions.
    - ivank 12y ago
      https://archive.org/about/dmca.php https://archive.org/about/dmca.php - it looks like the exemptions applied to everyone, for 3 years at least.
shmerl 12y ago
It should be fair use (non commercial, library purpose usage etc.).

meritt 12y ago

Has there been any High Scalability articles on their infrastructure? We have a similar need: storing a large volume of text-based content over a period of time, with versioning as well. On top of it we have various metadata. We're currently storing everything in MySQL -- a lightweight metadata row and a separate table for the large (~400KB on average) BLOB fields in a compressed table. We're looking at ways to improve our architecture: simply bigger+faster hardware? Riak with LevelDB as a backend? Filesystem storing with database for the metadata? We even considered using version control such as git or hg but that proved to be far too slow for reads compared to a PK database row lookup. Any HN'ers have suggestions?

ddorian43 12y ago
hypertable (store data and metadata in different access groups, basically different files on disk but in the same table) on top of QFS for distributed file system in reed-solomon replication(for ~more efficiency) you can keep n-versions(miscrosecond timestamps), sorted compressed data on disk for fast range reads, you can compress and group in blocks differently across access groups(access groups are just groups of columns) it was based on bigtable, which was written to store the crawling data(like you & waybackmachine?) for google search
mmagin 12y ago
I am a former Archive employee. I can't speak to their current infrastructure (though more of it is open source now - http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wayback/ http://archive-access.sourceforge.net/projects/wayback/ ), but as far as the wayback machine, there was no SQL database anywhere in it. For the purposes of making the wayback machine go: - Archived data was in ARC file format (predecessor to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_ARChive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_ARChive) which is essentially a concatenation of seperately gzipped records. That is, you can seek to a particular offset and start decompressing a record. Thus you could get at any archived web page with a triple (server, filename, file-offset) Thus it was spread across a lot of commodity grade machines. - An sorted index of all the content was built that would let you lookup (url) and give you a list of times or (url, time) to (filename, file-offset). It was implemented by building a sorted text file (first sorted on the url, second on the time) and sharded across many machines by simply splitting it into N roughly equal sizes. Binary search across a sorted text file is surprisingly fast -- in part because the first few points you look at in the file remain cached in RAM, since you hit them frequently. - (Here's where I'm a little rusty) The web frontend would get a request, query the appropriate index machine. Then it would use a little mechanism (network broadcast maybe?) to find out what server that (unique) filename was on, then it would request the particular record from that server. (Edit: FYI, my knowledge is 5 years old now. I know they've done some things to keep the index more current than they did back then.) At the very least, I'd think about getting your blobs out of MySQL and putting them in the filesystem. Filesystems are good at this stuff. You can certainly do something as simple as a SHA-1 hash of the content as the filename, and then depending on your filesystem's performance characteristics, you can have a couple levels in the tree you store them in. e.g. da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 goes into the directory da/39/ Then you stick da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 into the 'pointer' field in your table that replaces the actual data. Obviously this design assumes the content of _that_ file doesn't change. If you want to change the data for that row in the table, you have to write a new file in the filesystem and update the 'pointer'.

swalsh 12y ago

If you're looking to donate, they take bitcoin too! https://archive.org/donate/index.php https://archive.org/donate/index.php

sutro 12y ago

Nice work on this over the years, gojomo et al.

mholt 12y ago

Cool, but on a lot of sites (including some of my own, from 10+ years ago to recently) it doesn't get hardly any of the images. Am I the only one experiencing this?

buren 12y ago
If you're using AWS S3 check your resource policy

Vecrios 12y ago

I still cannot fathom how they are able to store huge amounts of data and not run out of space. Care anyone to explain?

dwhly 12y ago
From a conversation with Brewster a few years ago: The doubling of density of disk drives has allowed them to stay relatively neutral with respect to space for the Wayback machine. It still occupies approximately the same size as it has for the last 10 years, which is essentially a set of racks about 15-20 feet long altogether I think? However, the new TV news and search capability requires substantially more space than even the archive IIRC, or certainly is heading that way.

jackschultz 12y ago

Funny story about the Wayback Machine and how it helped me. I had let my blog go into disrepair for a couple months, and eventually, when I went back to it, I found that since I hadn't kept up with security updates, I wasn't able to access any of my old posts. When I went back to start writing again (this time using paid hosting so I didn't have to deal with that), I was disappointed that I wasn't going to have ~20-30 posts I had before. On a hunch, I checked the Wayback Machine and found that it had archived about 15 of my posts! Very excited that I could restore some of my previous writings.

rietta 12y ago

Wow, that's one billion more pages than there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot!

keenerd 12y ago

PSA/ranty thing: Just because something is archived in the Wayback machine, do not trust that archive.org will keep it there for all time. If you need something, make a local copy! A few months ago TIA changed their stance on robots.txt. They now retroactively honor robot blocks. Now any site can completely vanish from the archives. Let's say I died tomorrow. My family lets my domain slip. A squatter buys it and throws up a stock landing page, with a robots.txt that forbids spidering. TIA would delete my entire site from their index. I've already lost a few good sites to this sort of thing. If you depend on a resource, archive it yourself. edit - Official policy: https://archive.org/about/exclude.php https://archive.org/about/exclude.php If I am reading it properly, once blocked they never check later in case of a change of heart? No procedure for getting re-indexed at all?

gojomo 12y ago
A fair rant, but to correct some misperceptions: The retroactive application of robots.txt is not a new policy; it's been in place for at least 11 years, and I believe it arrived very soon after the Wayback Machine was first unveiled. An updated robots.txt does not irreversibly delete prior captures, so if the robots.txt changes again, access to previously-collected material can be re-enabled. This policy has served to minimize risk and automate the most common removal-scenario, when a webmaster wants a total opt-out of current crawling and past display. But, the collateral damage to unrelated content from prior domain-owners has grown as the web has aged, and more domains have changed hands. (The tradeoff that made sense in 2002 probably doesn't make sense in 2014.) Figuring out a system that can automate most legitimate exclusions, while rejecting or reversing those that lack a firm basis in content ownership or personal privacy, is a thorny task, but it would be worth pursuing if/when the Wayback Machine has the necessary staff resources. (My proposal since 2008 has been a DMCA-inspired 'put-back' procedure, where an original content owner can assert, formally, that they are the content owner and do not want the current-day robots.txt applied to captures before a certain date. Then, the current domain-owner would have to counter-notify that to maintain the block. This idea hasn't had legal review, but would reverse some current damage, and any bad-faith blockers would have to go on record with a false claim to maintain the block, potentially exposing them to a third-party legal challenge, with minimal risk to IA.)

leorocky 12y ago

And not one of those hits is from Quora due to their robots.txt: https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.quora.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.quora.com/ Good job Quora, preserving all that crowd sourced content away from the crowd, keeping it from everyone not logged in. Hats off to getting into YC so you can post your job openings on the HN home page and get some press. This doesn't add anything to your image though, it just takes a little away from YC. On another better note, a great big thank you to the wayback machine for all of the public good it does. Now there's an organization that is amazing and wonderful and enriching our lives in an open and honest way with information.

dredmorbius 12y ago
Man. I hate on Quora. Didn't realize they were YC. Shame.
- khalidmbajwa 12y ago
  And why would you do that ? I can see why the must-register roadbloack is annoying in theory but It takes a few minutes to register, and then its an absolute gold-mine of knowledge, with an extra-ordinary community, which is very positive, constructive and helpful. I find it way more engaging than HN Actually to be honest.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    If you want to have your private answer community, that's fine. Don't go whoring it on Google and other search engines as if the results are publicly visible when they're not. I'm also opposed on principle to sites which require registration and (in theory if not in practice) log all of my interactions -- what I read and how I interact with it is very personal information and data. It's why I'm opposed to the idea of logging in to, say, read The New York Times. It's one of a very small number of sites I'd subscribe to, but even then I'd prefer to access it without logging in. I've created throwaway accounts a few times to see if there's anything sufficiently worthwhile there. I'm largely convinced that 1) there's not and 2) the dynamics of the site work against it scaling or surviving. So I'm not going to waste my time with it.

dredmorbius 12y ago

I'd like to rave about an underappreciated but absolutely brilliant piece of the Internet Archive's infrastructure: its book reader (called, I gather, "BookReader"). TIA includes copious media archives including video, audio, and books. The latter are based on full-image scans and can be read online. I generally dislike full-format reading tools: Adobe Acrobat, xpdf, evince, and other PDF readers all have various frustrations. Google's own online book reader is a mass of Web and UI frustrations. I'm a guy who almost always prefers local to Web-based apps. TIA's book reader is the best I've seen anywhere, hands down. It's fast, it's responsive. The UI gets out of the way. Find your text and hit "fullscreen". Hit 'F11' on your browser to maximize it, you can then dismiss the (subtle) UI controls off the page and you are now ... reading your book. Just the book. No additional crap. Page turn is fast. Zoomed, the view seems to autocrop to the significant text on the page. Unlike every last damned desktop client, the book remains positioned on the screen in the same position as you navigate forward or backward through the book. Evince, by contrast, will turn a page and then position it with the top left corner aligned. You've got to. Reposition. Every. Damned. Page. Drives me insane (but hey, it's a short trip). You can seek rapidly through the text with the bottom slider navigation. About the only additions I could think of would be some sort of temporary bookmark or ability to flip rapidly between sections of a book (I prefer reading and following up on footnotes and references, this often requires skipping between sections of a text). Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Reg8KLB.png http://i.imgur.com/Reg8KLB.png Source: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/mode/2up http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/... But, for whomever at TIA was responsible for this, thank you. From a grumpy old man who finds far too much online to be grumpy about, this is really a delight. This appears to be an informational page with more links (including sources): https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
Wow, I had no idea. If you'd have asked me where to read older texts I'd have said "Project Gutenberg." This is miles better.
- dredmorbius 12y ago

pimlottc 12y ago

A little known fact is that there is a mirror of the Wayback Machine hosted by [The Bibliotheca Alexandrina: http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.aspx http://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/archive/archive_web.asp... I have sometimes had luck retrieving pages from this mirror that were unavailable (or returned errors) in the main site.

ultrasandwich 12y ago

> Before there was Borat, there was Mahir Cagri. This site and the track it inspired on mp3.com created quite a stir in the IDM world, with people claiming that “Mahir Cagri” was Turkish for “Effects Twin” and that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse by Richard D. James (Aphex Twin). (Captured December 29, 2004 and December 7, 2000) Okay this just blew my mind. Anyone else follow Aphex Twin's various shenanigans? Was this ever investigated further?