presents serial archive listings for

The World Factbook

The World Factbook was a publication of the US Central Intelligence Agency, summarizing information about countries and regions throughout the world. (There is a Wikipedia article about this serial.)

Publication History

The World Factbook was first published under this title in 1981, succeeding the National Basic Intelligence Factbook, which had started out as a classified publication and was first made available to the public in the mid-1970s. Editions of The World Factbook were typically published annually. The 2020 edition was the last to be published as a downloadable package, but the CIA continued to make online updates and annual archive snapshots through 2024. The CIA announced the end of the World Factbook series in 2026, and took editions off its site. Because of the Factbook's public domain status, many sites have unofficial copies of various editions.

Persistent Archives of Complete Issues

• 1981-2014, 2016-2017: HathiTrust has most issues from 1981 to 2017 freely readable online in page image form.
• 1982: WikiSource has the 1982 Factbook as illustrated searchable text.
• 1990-2010: Project Gutenberg has copies of 1990s and 2000s volumes, packaged as text and image files.
• 2015: The Wayback Machine has a zip file containing the 2015 Factbook.
• 2018: The Wayback Machine has a zip file containing the 2018 Factbook.
• 2019: The Wayback Machine has a zip file containing the 2019 Factbook.
• 2020: Simon Willison has an unzipped version of the 2020 Factbook on GitHub Pages.
• 2021: The Wayback Machine has a crawl of the 2021 archived Factbook. Content captured may be incomplete, and search might not work.
• 2022: The Wayback Machine has a crawl of the 2022 archived Factbook. Content captured may be incomplete, and search might not work.
• 2023: The Wayback Machine has a crawl of the 2023 archived Factbook. Content captured may be incomplete, and search might not work.
• 2024: The Wayback Machine has a crawl of the 2024 archived Factbook. Content captured may be incomplete, and search might not work.
• 2025-2026: One of the Wayback Machine's last crawls of the Factbook may include information that was updated in 2025 or 2026 and did not make it into an officially archived edition. However, the content captured may be incomplete (more so than previous archive crawls), may be from various dates, and search might not work.

Official Site / Current Material

• The official CIA World Factbook site includes a retrospective on the Factbook and its history.

Related Resources

• We also list the National Basic Intelligence Factbook, the predecessor to this title.

This is a record of a major serial archive. This page is maintained for The Online Books Page. (See our criteria for listing serial archives.) This page has no affiliation with the serial or its publisher.

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