at the time i'm writing this post, there are 3,417,572 accessible uploads in the nonfiction section & 2,528,277 in fiction. (snapshots: nonfiction, fiction.) that's over 5.9 million books - a net gain of 273,471 books since i first calculated this in march - giving a rate of almost 1300 new additions a day over the course of 2022.

if you know how to work with SQL databases (or can find someone who can), here's a snapshot from april 2019 that should allow you to get a sense of whether growth was faster from 2014-2019 or 2019-now. you could also try to use the wayback machine to get big-picture snapshots like the ones i used, but you'd need to know libgen's old URLs.

i threw this together based on numbers that are easily available, but if anyone wants to create a more detailed examination, you can use the database dumps (like the one i linked above) to examine changes in metadata like languages, publication dates, & the like. it would also be cool to see more graphs & charts, if anyone's interested in making those. because of libgen's fairly open architecture, it's much easier to work with its data than many other closed source libraries, so i hope people more technically capable than myself take advantage of that!"