Anna's Archive is a search engine of shadow libraries. It was founded in direct response to law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022. It describes itself as a project that 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][2]
Official logo of the Anna's Archive website
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Anna's Archive homepage (June 30, 2024)
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Type of site | Search engine, digital library, file sharing |
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| Founder(s) | Anna Archivist, Pirate Library Mirror[1] |
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| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | November 10, 2022; 20 months ago (2022-11-10)[2] |
| Current status | Active |
Anna's Archive mirrors Library Genesis, Open Library, Sci-Hub and Z-Library, and has scraped (downloaded the entirety of) the library catalog WorldCat.[4][5][6][7] Anna's Archive says that it does not host copyrighted materials and that it only indexes metadata that is already publicly available.[3]
As of July 1, 2024, Anna's Archive includes 30,445,640 books and 100,357,126 papers.[8]
Anna's Archive was founded by the Pirate Library Mirror, a team of anonymous archivists, in direct response to law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022.[1][3][5][9][10]
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".[6][7] In response to the scrape, Anna's Archive was sued on January 12, 2024 by OCLC, one of the maintainers of WorldCat. OCLC says that the scrape was the result of cyberattacks on its servers and that Anna's Archive allows public download of scraped data.[11] The only named defendant in the lawsuit denies any involvement with Anna's Archive or in hacking WorldCat.[12]
On January 2024, Anna's Archive was blocked in Italy due to a copyright complaint by the Italian Publishers Association.[13] On March 2024, Anna's Archive was blocked by some internet service providers in the Netherlands due to a request by BREIN, an anti-piracy group.[14]
On July 1, 2024, the .org mirror started to redirect to the .gs mirror.[8] On July 11, 2024, Anna Archivist has reported on their subreddit that the .gs mirror is not functioning, and to use the .se mirror, or the new .li mirror instead; the .org mirror also stopped redirecting.[15]
