Anna's Archive is a search engine for shadow libraries created by the pseudonymous Anna[1] that calls itself "the largest truly open library in human history".[2] It was founded in direct response to law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022. It has said it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and to "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form".[3]
Anna's Archive aggregates data from several major shadow libraries, including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library, as well as other sources. It claims it does not directly host copyrighted materials and that it only indexes metadata that is already publicly available. However, it has faced legal action from publishers and anti-piracy groups for violating copyright law.
Website
The code and data for Anna's Archive are fully open source, and it asks for volunteer contributions. It preserves its data in bulk using torrent files in order to remain resilient to website takedowns. The site itself claims not to host copyrighted materials,[4] but it links to places where they can be downloaded.[3]
The site provides file downloads via the servers of anonymous partners,[4] as well as through the IPFS protocol.[5] It has a two-tiered system of download options in which high-speed downloads are only available to users with an active membership, while nonmembers must use slower options with browser verification to prevent abuse by bots. It claims that donations and membership fees are mostly spent on infrastructure and that none are personally given to team members.[4]
As of 31 December 2024, Anna's Archive includes 38,096,712 books and 106,532,043 papers,[2] and its torrents total roughly one petabyte in size.[6] It lists Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, the Internet Archive, DuXiu, MagzDB, and Nexus/STC among its "source libraries", and Open Library and WorldCat as metadata-only sources.[7]
History
Anna's Archive was created by members of the Pirate Library Mirror project,[1][8] an anonymous effort to mirror shadow libraries that began in direct response to U.S. law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022.[9] It initially displayed results from Library Genesis and Z-Library.[1][3][8]
On 3 October 2023, Anna's Archive was reported to have scraped (downloaded the entirety of) WorldCat, the world's largest book metadata database, which they described as "a major milestone in mapping out all the books in the world".[10][11]OCLC, one of the maintainers of WorldCat, responded by suing the organization on 12 January 2024, claiming that the scrape was the result of damaging cyberattacks on its servers and that Anna's Archive knowingly violated copyright law.[12][13][14] Technology blog Techdirt criticized the action as "costly and pointless", saying that it went against OCLC's stated mission of making information accessible.[15] The only named defendant in the suit denied any involvement with Anna's Archive or the WorldCat scrape.[16]
In July 2024, the site's .org mirror was temporarily replaced with a new .gs mirror to avoid falling under US jurisdiction;[13] however, shortly afterwards, the .gs domain was suspended and the site reverted to the old .org domain.[17]
