# MajinBook: An open catalogue of digitally mediated world literature

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11412 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11412/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Spoiler Detection from Large-Scale Review Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13416/) (2019)
- [Multi-level computational methods for interdisciplinary research in the HathiTrust Digital Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01090/) (2017)
- [The Afterlives of Shakespeare and Company in Online Social Readership](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07340/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This data paper introduces MajinBook, an open catalogue designed to facilitate the use of shadow libraries-such as Library Genesis and Z-Library-for computational social science and cultural analytics. By linking metadata from these vast, crowd-sourced archives with structured bibliographic data from Goodreads, we create a high-precision corpus of over 539,000 references to digitally mediated English-language books. Spanning three centuries and reflecting a contemporary selection bias, these entries are enriched with first publication dates, genres, and popularity metrics like ratings and reviews. Our methodology prioritises natively digital EPUB files to ensure machine-readable quality, while addressing biases in traditional corpora like HathiTrust, and includes secondary datasets for French, German, and Spanish. We evaluate the linkage strategy for accuracy, release all underlying data openly, and discuss the project's legal permissibility under EU and US frameworks for text and data mining in research.