Donations: a responsible help

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OpenLibra is a personal project; it is not financed by any public or private organisation nor any company; it does not get any type of subsidies and it does not use advertising or partnership programs. All the costs generated by the platform are paid exclusively with my personal funds. In other words, OpenLibra is my altruistic contribution to the culture world and the dissemination of free bibliography.

And despite how rewarding it is to facilitate students and people interested, the access to a number of resources that otherwise would be more tedious, all this project generates expenses. That is where selfless collaborations from the community and its members are always welcome and greatly appreciated.

Expenses: servers

To continue with OpenLibra's policy based on full transparency, here you have a brief summary of the project expenses:

• Physical servers

  Currently, OpenLibra serves an average of 100,000 daily downloads with major peaks up to 500,000 when social networks spread some particularly interesting publication.

  As the material managed by the platform are books, we are talking about a very high number of information for the standards of a free server. This requires to use dedicated and more expensive solutions. Specifically, OpenLibra currently runs on two dedicated servers to provide an acceptable quality to its users.

• Cloud servers

  In the same way, to be able to provide that number of downloads in an agile way and with the highest possible download speed, the books have been externalised to the servers of the giant Amazon, specifically, to its servers network S3 through CloudFront. This platform guarantees that the books are always on-line, protected and available to all users regardless of their geographical location. Again, this solution implies a monthly fee based on the volume of managed data.

Not Advertising

One of the premises of the project when it started was the solid intention to, like Wikipedia, not show advertising to its users. Like any of you, I find it very annoying to navigate through a website where I have to constantly dodge banners, pop-ups and all sorts of ads in the most exotic formats: hidden in buttons that apparently are part of the application, in overlapping layers, etc. As a web developer and designer, in addition to the previous statement, I wanted to keep the user interface clean and clear so that the books were the true and only focus.

Even though it could be an acceptable source of income given the volume of visits to the project, I want to try to keep OpenLibra both now and in the future outside of all kinds of invasive advertising campaigns.

For all of the above reasons...

If you like the project; if you find useful the effort to collect in one place the highest number of free bibliographic resources; if you like to not see advertising and not get asked for your email every time you want to download something; if you enjoy our download speed that does not take hours to complete a simple book... support us.

Any voluntary donation is welcome and it helps both to keep the service quality and to grow in content.

And if you want to help us but you cannot do it financially, share the platform with your friends. Use social networks to make us known, write reviews about the books you liked the most, suggest us a book we do not have yet and, of course, continue enjoying the platform.

Thank you.

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Carlos Benítez, EtnasSoft