Internet Archive offering over a million torrents on BitTorrent

Internet Archive has affirmed on its official blog that it is offering over 1,000,000 torrents, including live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, several books and all new uploads from their patrons who are into Community collections. While saying this, it has also added that there is more to come. Quite in line with its motto of providing Universal access to information, the post elaborates further, "To download the Torrent of the files in the item, click the Torrent link at the bottom of the download box; your Torrent client (such as transmission and uTorrent) can use the Torrent file you get to download the files in the Archive item, including the original item files, plus all derivative and metadata files."

Offering over a million torrents on BitTorrent

Users also have the option of selecting or deselecting single files from within most BitTorrent clients. This way, users can get either the entire item or a specific set of files from within that.  

John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation adds, "

I supported the original creation of BitTorrent because I believe in building technology to make it easy for communities to share what they have. The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn’t just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive.”

Internet Archive further mentioned that BitTorrent is the fastest way to download items from the Archive, because BitTorrent client can download simultaneously from two different Archive servers that are at two different datacenters. "The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections," it adds. 

BitTorrent is massive and the protocol is one of the world’s most used protocol for sharing files with others. uTorrent is one of the most popular clients used around the world - it’s free and it’s also owned by BitTorrent. uTorrent was bought over by BitTorrent some 6 years ago. Now, there’s a unique new technology that’s based on Javascript called Torque being added to the mix.

The Torque project allows developers to use a number of features from within the browser. There are currently two main working applications, the Oneclick Chrome plugin and the other, called Paddle Over. Oneclick Chrome plugin is a simple plugin that installs on your Chrome browser like any other extension. What it does is that it lets you download torrents directly through the browser without the need of a separate BitTorrent client.

Files download like you would download any other file from a regular HTTP or FTP server using the default download manager built within Chrome.