As far as I can tell the single zip downloadable versions stopped being published after 2020. I grabbed a copy of the 2020 zip from the Internet Archive and turned it into a GitHub repo here: https://github.com/simonw/cia-world-factbook-2020/

If enough people FOIA them maybe they'll decide it's cheaper to just put the archived website back up!

https://www.muckrock.com/

It was all released into the public domain already. If you can obtain a copy it's yours to do what you like with.

Every country puts out an official gazette with abundant regulatory and statistical information. Of course you'd be foolish to rely on all these at face value, but it's an excellent starting point for assessing the economic activity of any given country. You can then synthesize it with things like market data and publicly available shipping information. Plus the CIA has (at least I hope it still has) a large staff of people whose only job is to study print, broadcast, and electronic media about other countries and compile that into regular reports of What Goes On There.

Obviously there's all sorts of covert information gathering that also goes on, but presumably the product of that is classified by default. Fortunately our executive branch is headed by intellectual types who enjoy reading and synthesizing a wealth of complex detail /s

> you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships,

The World Fact Book doesn't have this kind of commentary. For example read the entry on North Korea. I've excerpted the most critical parts here, and I think they are a long way from your characterization:

> After the end of Soviet aid in 1991, North Korea faced serious economic setbacks that exacerbated decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation.

> New economic development plans in the 2010s failed to meet government-mandated goals for key industrial sectors, food production, or overall economic performance. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, North Korea instituted a nationwide lockdown that severely restricted its economy and international engagement.

> As of 2024, despite slowly renewing cross-border trade with China, North Korea remained one of the world's most isolated countries and one of Asia's poorest

https://web.archive.org/web/20260103000011/https://www.cia.g...

I'd be interested to see concrete examples of this, if they exist.

While that is true, the current government makes heavy use of propaganda too.

Yep. This seems somewhat similar in motivation to the cuts to USAID.

I think the quality of internet content depends on where you lurk and contribute.

The CIA World Factbook is a tertiary source.

The CIA was a secondary source. This bulk of this material is all drawn from other publications. Which you can now access in ways you could not before.

Not if everything is made up on the spot for clicks and views, which is where we're heading.

> It was not just a physical book.

It was. You were able to access a copy on the internet. It was neither edited nor published there. As such it simply couldn't compete with resources that are.