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Anna’s Archive: Open-source data library
- pilimi_anna 3y agoAnna here. Thanks for the support and feedback in these comments!
- culi 3y agoReally cool archives. Another project you might wanna check out is DocuWiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki the software). It often gets looked over because it leverages the Ed2k network but it's often been the only source I've found for certain rare documentaries https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages Thanks kindly for your work
- qingcharles 3y agoGreat link, thank you. I'd not heard about this wiki before. Now I'm going to lose more time I don't have to spare watching some documentaries.
- pilimi_anna 3y agoThanks. Added to our list of libraries and archives to look at.
- pmcjones 3y agoHave you looked at Tailscale for server-to-server communication?
- CaptainFever 3y agoThis is amazing. Thank you for your work.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoWhile I wouldn't download books via this website, the search engine is excellent! (Better than Amazon and Google.) Could you consider adding filtering the results by year? Also, just out of curiosity, how much storage does your archive take? I am guessing it is in the order of petabytes.
- maxiwer 3y agoWhat's the point of these kind of "Free books"? It would be better if we could organize something like real book exchanging worldwide.
- vorpalhex 3y agoThere are some books for which official ebooks don't exist.. but those ebooks appear on Anna's archive. And they are well done conversions, not just OCR copies. There are books on the archive that do exist in real life but are _extremely_ rare or may as well not exist. I'm lucky enough to have a real dead tree library in my home but I still use ebooks heavily, and often duplicate books in both collections.
- sheepdestroyer 3y agoAre you really asking what's the points of making almost any book freely available online? This is extremely valuable to anyone who ever needed a book but could not easily get it for whatever reason. You're free to contact book clubs from all over the world to locate and trade paper ones with you if you're not in a hurry, but you obviously don't depend on getting the ressource fast, reliably or at all.
- jrflowers 3y agoWhy would you post this question online rather than simply writing it in a nice card and sending it to me?
- draugadrotten 3y agoThis is an amazing resource for students in e.g. rural Africa. They do not have access to physical libraries like you would.
- mdp2021 3y ago> like you would Like many would. Do not take libraries for granted - not even in "rich" countries.
- 3y ago
- mdp2021 3y agoAnd the first available text is David K Levine; Michele Boldrin - Against Intellectual Monopoly (2008) > So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps
- defrost 3y agoPlenty of others to tickle the norms; eg two editions of, and commentary on: Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1975) ~ E.F. Schumacher “Small is Beautiful is E. F. Schumacher's stimulating and controversial study of world economies. This remarkable book is as relevant today and its themes as pertinent and thought-provoking as when it was first published thirty years ago. Small is Beautiful looks at the economic structure of the Western world in a revolutionary way. Schumacher maintains that Man's current pursuit of profit and progress, which promotes giant organisations and increased specialisation, has in fact resulted in gross economic inefficiency, environmental pollution and inhumane working conditions. Schumacher challenges the doctrine of economic, technological and scientific specialisation and proposes a system of Intermediate Technology, based on smaller working units, communal ownership and regional workplaces utilising local labour and resources.” https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Small+is+Beautiful https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Small+is+Beautiful
- Barrin92 3y agoSchumpeter pointed out that innovation is rarely the result of free market regimes but instead of monopolistic competition. A situation in which individual winners temporarily capture markets and use high surplus returns to fund fundamentally expensive innovation. In dynamic economies usually a handful of firms dominate in the medium term. They're replaced across time, they don't compete in the same space. More and more complex and developed economies naturally move towards this because progress requires immense capital. Under conditions of extremely free markets firms profits are reduced due to competition, consumers capture immediate value, but the sectors remain stagnant. An example are many service industries. This also applies to open source software. it is by its nature extremely competitive and as a result almost all value is captured by its users. This is great at any given point in time, but it also means that open source software is constantly underfunded, and research is in fact ironically driven by surpluses of large firms.
- dharmab 3y agoI love this website. I find lots of obscure texts here I can't find anywhere else.
- mrweasel 3y agoI don't get it, on the frontpage you have books like "Harry Potter", I'm fairly sure that's not open source or even available for free distribution. It also seems counter intuitive that you get preferential treatment if you login, why would that be the case, if it's truly open?
- ftxbro 3y ago> "it also seems counter intuitive that you get preferential treatment if you login" what preferential treatment is that
- jer0me 3y ago> Fast downloads from our partners (requires logging in) https://annas-archive.org/md5/224c5b1195fd2fb4650c3b75c2908d65 https://annas-archive.org/md5/224c5b1195fd2fb4650c3b75c2908d...
- ftxbro 3y agooh that's weird are they honeypotting me like if I try to fast-download harry potter the intellectual property police will come at me for violating the wizarding world extended universe franchise
- saxomoose 3y agoIs this also your go-to since LE action on Zlibrary?
- rjaco31 3y agoThey removed the public DNS, but z-library is working just fine with Tor. I think you even have the .onion url on their Wikipedia page.
- ranting-moth 3y agozlib is back, singlelogin.re.
- TechBro8615 3y agoI followed the "blog" link in the footer and found some interesting posts, like this one [0] about the technical and operational details of running the archive. [0] https://annas-blog.org/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html https://annas-blog.org/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html
- Findeton 3y agoI fully agree with them, copyright is a limited monopoly granted by governments. It doesn't have the properties of private property, it's an artificial limitation to creative work/ideas, which is basically unlimited by nature. It's government intervention creating scarcity where there isn't scarcity, it's an evil intervention of government on the free market.
- SamuelAdams 3y agoI was impressed by this part: > Cloudflare does not accept anonymous payments, so we can only use their free plan. This means that we can’t use their load balancing or failover features. We therefore implemented this ourselves at the domain level. On page load, the browser will check if the current domain is still available, and if not, it rewrites all URLs to a different domain. Are there any free and open source tools for load balancing that rival Cloudflare’s paid offerings?
- MacsHeadroom 3y agoNo, but there are anonymous bill payment services and pre-paid crypto debit cards which support privacy coins like Monero.
- gigatexal 3y agoI think Aaron Swartz would love this effort.
- cafiw41133 3y ago[dead]
- cafiw41133 3y ago[dead]
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- netfortius 3y agoIs this just to get some HN karma points? Posting here makes almost sure another z-lib alternative gets shutdown... :(
- awestroke 3y agoYeah. It's such a shame that archiving is a zero-sum game. If I archive some books, nobody else can archive them.
- gigglesupstairs 3y agoIt has already been posted here multiple times before.
- netfortius 3y agoAnd this (repetitive postings) makes it right ... how?
- pixelbath 3y agoAnd sharing the link with other people (a desire stated on the website itself) makes it wrong...how?
- nathancahill 3y agoDoes anyone have the Z-lib Discord that's floating around? Contact in profile if you don't want to post it publicly.
- baryonBoi 3y agoJust use their telegram bots or their desktop application.
- netfortius 3y agoSent ...
- glietu 3y agoWell, sometimes it’s better to have best kept secrets as … secrets. Don’t wanna lose this, after what happened to zLib.
- nanny 3y agoFor real. Please delete!
- pilimi_anna 3y agoOpsec + open source > gatekeeping
- glietu 3y agoHow do?
- baryonBoi 3y agozLibrary is alive and thriving more than ever. Now they even have Telegram bots and unique user URLs.
- jacooper 3y agoZlib is still live btw
- wiz21c 3y agoDumb question: is this legal ?
- madphilosopher 3y agoIllegal but not immoral.
- hedora 3y agoThe front page of Anna’s archive makes it clear they want to organize the would’s information, and make it universally accessible, so no. The next question is why the courts would say that Anna’s archive is illegal, but Google is not. There are some tests around encouraging copyright infringement, and Google is very careful to pass those tests despite providing extremely similar services over similarly-illegal sites. The mental and legal gymnastics required for all this are fascinating. I suggest studying internet IP law.
- __anon-2023__ 3y ago> organize the would’s information, and make it universally accessible, so no. That's similar one of Google's goals, and they do it (mostly) legally.
- tiagod 3y agoDepends on your jurisdiction (but in most likelihood not)
- mdp2021 3y agoIt could be a greatest lead to know where it may be - places where cultivation is a paramount value.
- Mezzie 3y agoIn the US and Canada (the only countries whose copyright law I have studied), it is not.
- immibis 3y ago
- iguana_lawyer 3y agoRecent attempts in the United States to ban books and close libraries has made sharing books without concern for copyright law a moral imperative.
- devinprater 3y agoThis is important for blind people too, since a lot of stuff like Kindle, Apple Books and such, use DRM. That means that if I wanted to read a book on my Braille EReader, without using my phone which adds another device, another battery, and so on, I'd have to un-DRM the book. Lately though, Kindle have changed their DRM stuff so the tools used don't work anymore. So getting them from these types of sites; thankfully EPUB versions are available, is the only way I can choose what device I read my book on. It's a bit like using emulators to read text from the screen using OCR.
- pilimi_anna 3y agoThis is great to hear. We've put a decent amount of time into accessibility when building the site. If you have any feedback for us on this, that'd be very helpful!
- beefield 3y agoI kind of understand many of the books in the front page, but is there a message for example in harry potter or game of thrones that I do not get?
- theptip 3y ago“We have the popular copyrighted stuff too”?