# SourceLibrary

11 Hacker News commenters recommended SourceLibrary and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A free, open source collection of historical texts, including thousands of Renaissance books, with a research agent for answering questions about them. Some texts are machine translated.

## Why people recommend it

- Vast collection of beautiful texts (2 comments): "It is a vast and beautiful collection that I spent hours checking out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48900203)) "This is an amazing collection." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49839393))
- Useful for original historical research (2 comments): "The use case is doing original historical research on your phone instead of social media." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50030788)) "this was really designed to support humanists" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788460))
- Relevant, poignant research agent answers (2 comments): "It’s a pretty powerful research agent!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48897553)) "the answers are relevant and poignant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48790670))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Anna's Archive](https://hackerapproved.com/p/anna-s-archive.md): 134 recommend
- [Project Gutenberg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/project-gutenberg.md): 76 recommend
- [Standard Ebooks](https://hackerapproved.com/p/standard-ebooks.md): 34 recommend
- [Library Genesis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/library-genesis.md): 15 recommend
- [LibGen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libgen.md): 12 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://sourcelibrary.org/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "SourceLibrary", https://hackerapproved.com/p/sourcelibrary-org/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).