BitTorrent. A bit torrent with all papers and books shared for free on LW ever would be really neat especially if we had people share private collections.
Good idea. I just created a torrent file. I̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶c̶o̶m̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶p̶i̶c̶k̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶P̶D̶F̶'̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶l̶o̶a̶d̶,̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶l̶o̶a̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶b̶r̶a̶r̶y̶. (It's now a compressed zip file; see update below.) Here's the magnet URI:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1D845DB543FFF3DE83B66FAA595F1A3D9F42ED42&dn=Library.zip&tr=udp%3a//tracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80/announce
Please note that many (~40%) of the books and articles included here were given to me...
Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern, myself and others have provided 132 academic papers for the LessWrong community (out of 152 requests, a 87% success rate) through the Free research, editing and articles thread. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.
If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.
Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.
Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.
If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, Google Reader will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly).
If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.