Anna's Archive is a search engine for shadow libraries created by the pseudonymous Anna.[3] It was founded in direct response to law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022. It describes itself as aiming to "catalog all the books in existence" and to "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form".[4][2]
As of September 21, 2024, Anna's Archive includes 37,666,367 books and 105,835,081 papers.[10]
Website
The code and data for Anna's Archive are fully open source. It preserves its collection in bulk using torrents in order to make the site resilient to failure. It has a two-tiered system of file download options, in which high-speed downloads are only available to users with an active membership, while non-members have to use the slower options where they must verify their browser to prevent scraping.[11]
History
Anna's Archive was founded by the Pirate Library Mirror, a team of anonymous archivists, in direct response to U.S. law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022.[12][13][14]
On October 3, 2023, Anna's Archive was reported to have scraped WorldCat, the world's largest book metadata database. Anna's Archive says that the scrape "marks a major milestone in mapping out all the books in the world" and that it allows them to "work on making a to-do list of all the books that still need to be preserved".[15] In response to the scrape, Anna's Archive was sued on January 12, 2024 by OCLC, one of the maintainers of WorldCat.[16] OCLC says that the scrape was the result of cyberattacks on its servers and that Anna's Archive allows public download of scraped data. The only named defendant in the lawsuit denies any involvement with Anna's Archive or in hacking WorldCat.[17]
On November 4, 2023, Anna reported on their blog that they had acquired a copy of DuXiu, a database of scanned Chinese books.[18] The data was released without embargoes on June 16, 2024.[19]
On July 1, 2024, the .org mirror started to redirect to the .gs mirror.[22] On July 11, 2024, Anna reported on their subreddit that the .gs mirror was not functioning, and to use the .se mirror, or the new .li mirror instead; the .org mirror also stopped redirecting.[23][24]