26 ms·
Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team
- hereme888 1y agoIsn't it humorous how citizens are pro Anna's archive, but governments are against it? Bit of additional evidence for elitism and such.
- jimbokun 1y agoWhat about writers?
- MYEUHD 1y agoIIRC it was shown that piracy increases sales for books. For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.
- black_knight 1y agoThis is true for me! For authors like, I might read a few epubs, then buy their entire series in hardcover (or paperback if no hardcover is available) to have in my bookshelves for rainy days.
- kelnos 1y agoThat's absurd. I could potentially believe the conclusion that piracy doesn't take away from sales (that is, most people who pirate would otherwise do without, and not buy a copy). But the idea that many/most (or even some significantly-small percentage) of people who pirate will buy copies of the things they like? No, that doesn't pass the sniff test.
- solidsnack9000 1y agoI actually have bought many books that I started reading online. The book format is useful.
- wiseowise 1y agoI do. When I was poor – I couldn't do it. Now that I'm wealthy and can afford any book, I prefer to take a quick look at online version and then buy a physical copy.
- baq 1y agoKids who don’t have pocket money won’t, but they aren’t lost sales anyway.
- lucb1e 1y agoIf you and I would support the works we think are good, why wouldn't others? I keep noticing that people constantly expect worse morals from others than how they claim they are themselves It's easy to add a "me too" onto the existing list but that's not my point. I think we generally can expect better from the average person than we instinctively do. If 50% of people are just as honest as we are (if we're average persons which, on average, we are), that would be easily worth it if free distribution of a book gets you a 3x bigger reach as compared to when people have to pay up front. I'm not aware of research confirming or refuting this (of course I'd like to believe that information can be free), but it doesn't seem so outlandish to me that we can ignore the option altogether by doing a sniff test
- fsflover 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476 EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com) 280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments
- dartharva 1y agoThe official EU study that proves exactly this is just one google search away, but here: https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
- joha4270 1y agoEven if that might be the case now, I doubt that holds if piracy becomes truly widespread. I would suspect A pirates book B and tells C about it, C buys book B is a lot more common than A pirates book B and likes it enough to buy it I have no data to support this, and while I have paid for things I could access for free, but I'm sufficiently pessimistic about human nature to think that's the norm.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoPiracy has been "truly widespread" for decades now. Most people who are able to, still pay for things, especially if they're convenient. Even when those services actually add additional restrictions to their access to the media they think they're paying for.
- IAmBroom 1y ago"Despite the data, I continue to guess that in the future my hypothesis will be true." Bold. Not inherently incorrect, but not optimally heuristic.
- fsflover 1y agoDespite which data? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
- skeaker 1y agoDepends. I've seen some in favor and some against. Academics who have their papers paywalled by publishing entities against their own wills are generally for it.
- griffzhowl 1y agoAcademics get their income from their university positions, and don't get any royalties from sales of their articles. Instead, the benefit they get from publishing is to their reputation, and for that it's better for their work to be as available as possible. It's completely different for a writer who gets their income from sales of their work, obviously
- skeaker 1y agoYep. And not that you asked, but my own opinion (not theirs) is that even writers who get income from sales will be fine either way. Reading a book for free and then buying it to support the author if you want to has been a practice for longer than the internet has existed. It's exactly how libraries have always worked!
- hereme888 1y agoMy comment made the assumption that everything in Anna's archive is the result of taxpayer-funded or public research.
- thomassmith65 1y agoIt is neither humorous nor strange because that formulation omits authors. How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it? I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.
- mft_ 1y agoIMO, Scihub and the ebook parts of AA should be considered differently and not conflated. In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks. In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from. (I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)
- thomassmith65 1y agoThat's an excellent point. The problem cases with AA are edge cases on sci-hub.
- baq 1y agoThe law only benefits the most popular authors, otherwise it protects publishers primarily.
- hereme888 1y agoI made the assumption everything relates to scientific papers that have been made public or were taxpayer funded.
- _thisdot 1y agoI know one popular author who doesn't care: Brandon Sanderson. In addition he makes it possible to buy DRM free ebooks from his website. In his words: “My experience has been that readers want to support things they like … But if they are at a point in their lives where they can’t, then it’s better to let them read the stories they want … and let them support artists when they’re capable of it. So I am a big fan of giving away books for free.” Source: https://www.jotdown.es/2016/12/brandon-sanderson-i-want-to-show-in-my-writing-that-there-is-something-inherently-good-inside-human-beings/ https://www.jotdown.es/2016/12/brandon-sanderson-i-want-to-s...
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoI dread these. I still remember the rarbg announcement from a few years back I saw here. Do I even dare click the link?
- dulpo 1y agoThis is surprising. I thought last I heard they'd arrested the guy who was suspected of running the site, about a year or so ago. Guess I'm misremembering. Also I'm surprised Cloudflare hasn't shut them down like they do for other dodgy sites.
- lode 1y agoWhen accessing from Belgium the link is blocked by Cloudflare: Error HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare's pass-through security and CDN services within Belgium
- dulpo 1y agoInteresting. Seems to be only certain jurisdictions. I can access it no problem from the UK Vodafone network.
- spacedcowboy 1y agoHmm. Even the title link above doesn't work for me on Virgin's cable, in the UK
- dulpo 1y agoDo you see an error page / blocked page? I used to get archive.org blocked and had to contact my provider to have the filters taken off.
- spacedcowboy 1y agoNope,it just takes forever, then eventually shows a blank screen...
- camtarn 1y agoI'm unable to resolve the domain on EE UK - looks like it's DNS blocked. By comparison, on my work network (TalkTalk) I can resolve the domain but I get a connection reset from the site. I think this might be the first time I've hit a DNS block. It feels rather eerie seeing people talking about a site that, from my point of view, doesn't even exist...
- max_ 1y agoThe entire internet needs to be re-designed to stand up against attacks. - DDOS attacks - Spamming - UK like surveillance laws - LLM scraping Why is it that there is almost not initiative for this?
- dulpo 1y agoRedesigned like how?
- anon191928 1y agobecause they will come after new design? how do you not see this?
- monster_truck 1y agoI'll start the wiki
- freefaler 1y agoDecentralization and interoperability, including the TCP routing protocols give the ability for the network to grow freely, but makes those kind of attacks easier. The easiest way to mitigate those problem will be to decrease the openness and centralize more. It might lead to even worse things that DDOS.
- revskill 1y agoOpenai need to train their models based on these books, not stackoverflow or reddit.
- burkaman 1y agoThey do: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/1888019174133276846 https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/1888019174133276846, https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgpt-llama-copyright-infringement-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-ai https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-o... The tweet only names Meta, but it would be very surprising if OpenAI didn't do the same thing.
- CamperBob2 1y agoAnyone who doesn't train on all material available, legal or otherwise, will be outcompeted by teams that do, including those based in countries that don't respect Western copyright law. It's that simple. Either this is practice is judged (or legislated) to be fair use, or copyright is done. It's also that simple.
- alfalfasprout 1y agoSo, what? Authors and rights holders are supposed to just take it? Copyright law exists for a reason. Trying to improve an LLM doesn't give you the right to flout our legal system. Yes, other countries might have an advantage in LLM training as a result but so be it.
- crazygringo 1y ago> Authors and rights holders are supposed to just take it? If it's judged as fair use, then yes. And then it's not flouting anything. Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim. For example, nonfiction authors already "just take it" when reviews describe the main points of their book without paying them a cent. The justification is that it's for the greater good, and rights are limited.
- slt2021 1y agoAnna's archives is possibly the greatest site ever. Infinite love to the team <3
- xtracto 1y agoKind of... the fact that they have the actual data behind a "soft" paywall (waiting times and terribly slow transfers otherwise) makes me a bit skeptic of their "goodwill".
- mattl 1y agoBandwidth isn’t free of charge
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoTheir backdoor plan to get rich! Not going to fool me this time VCs!! Everyone involved is taking on significant personal liability and hosting expenses. Not sure what more you expect.
- klik99 1y agoYes spot on, crazy that asking for an optional pittance for less bandwidth throttling on such a huge and risky project can be seen as exploitative.
- SimianSci 1y agoNo such thing as free when bandwidth costs money. Any service online that is handing out things for free without restriction is getting their return through scrupulus means and shouldnt be trusted. Anna's Archive straddles the line enough to allow people to download books for free but not at too great an expense to the volunteers who pay out of pocket to support the project.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stonecharioteer 1y agoPlease remain up. Libgen no longer works. I've used IRC for fiction and non-fiction but tech books needs Anna's Archive and Libgen. I buy the physical with company budget to pay the author but I need DRM free ebooks to read comfortably on my Tab S9 Ultra.
- DyslexicAtheist 1y agolibgen is still there
- gregorygoc 1y agoWhat’s the url?
- duckkg5 1y agoNot accurate. You are probably looking at a site like https://libgen.ac/ https://libgen.ac/ which states clearly at the top: "Not a Part of Library Genesis. ex libgen.io, libgen.org" The real one has been down for a long time.
- moffkalast 1y agoThe pirate bay's been down for a long time too. And yet...
- sureglymop 1y agoAll original mirrors currently seem down. But other mirrors are up. Check here: https://open-slum.org/ https://open-slum.org/
- boombapoom 1y agofuck those guys, annas archive is one of the last good things about the internet.
- lysace 1y ago[flagged]
- gjsman-1000 1y ago> Information should be free I'm sick and tired of this misquote; as it was merely an observation of trends, and was never meant to be a moral maxim or mandate. If you truly believe information needs to be free as a moral mandate, share your company's source code first.
- danielPort9 1y agoI see it as “everyone deserves respect”. No need to overanalyse it. It’s one of those few things in life that are simply true, no proof needed.
- renewiltord 1y agoI see it as "Carthage must be destroyed". No need to nitpick it. We must destroy Carthage.
- Davidzheng 1y agowas the alternative for the pirate bay people jailtime?
- tzs 1y agoIf #1 is a reference to a famous quote from Steward Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, it's only part of the quote. The rest is relevant: > On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other He stated later more succinctly: > Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away
- baal80spam 1y agoannas-archive.li/blog, 2025-08-17 About recent events. We are still alive and kicking. In recent weeks we’ve seen increased attacks on our mission. We are taking steps to harden our infrastructure and operational security. The work of securing humanity’s legacy is worth fighting for. Since we started in 2022, we have liberated tens of millions of books, scientific articles, magazines, newspapers, and more. These are now forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes, thanks to everyone who helps with torrenting. Anna’s Archive itself has organized some of the largest scrapes: we acquired tens of millions of files from IA Controlled Digital Lending, HathiTrust, DuXiu, and many more. We have also scraped and published the largest book metadata collections in history: WorldCat, Google Books, and others. With this we’ll be able to identify which books are still missing from our collections, and prioritize saving the rarest ones. Much thanks to all of our volunteers for making these projects happen. We’ve forged some incredible partnerships. We’ve partnered with two LibGen forks, STC/Nexus, Z-Library. We’ve secured tens of millions additional files through these partnerships. And they are helping the mission by mirroring our files. Unfortunately we have seen the disappearance of one of the LibGen forks. We don’t have further information about what happened there, but are saddened by this development. There is a new entrant: WeLib. They appear to have mirrored most of our collection, and use a fork of our codebase. We have copied some of their user interface improvements, and are grateful for that push. Sadly, we are not seeing them share any new collections, nor share their codebase improvements. Since they haven’t shown commitment to contributing back to the ecosystem, we advise extreme caution. We recommend not using them. In the meantime, we have some exciting projects in the works. We have hundreds of terabytes in new collections sitting on our servers, waiting to be processed. If you’re at all interested in helping out, feel free to check out our Volunteering and Donate pages. We run all of this on a minimal budget, so any help is greatly appreciated. Keep fighting.
- thorn 1y agoKudos to the team behind this project! It looks like they have improved UI in last year. The crucial problem right now is to remain accessible or to survive. I have no idea how much effort is being put into it. I wonder is it possible to remain afloat despite all efforts to take them down?
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThere was a pretty major UI update in the past 2-5 days-ish. Apologies for the minor grumble, but on mobile I used to be able to browse search results much more effectively; the new design only fits ~4-5 results on a screen.
- pilimi_anna 1y agoSearch settings => Display => List (compact)
- oguz-ismail 1y ago> We recommend not using them I've been using WeLib since April and had a good experience so far
- keroro 1y agoWhy use them over annas archive?
- oguz-ismail 1y agocleaner interface
- SimianSci 1y agoIf efforts like this are to be sustainable in any lasting way, participants need to be cooperative, not parasitic. I agree with the Anna's Archive team, it serves noone to have one of these players in the space hoarding their own collections and not sharing them to other archiving projects, it make the collection extremely vulnerable and at risk of becoming lost knowledge as time goes on.
- jeron 1y agoI disagree with how this is framed. shadow libraries thrive on decentralization, any other servers mirroring a collection is better than no mirrors at all
- SimianSci 1y agoIm not sure how you disagree with this. Decentralization relies on multiple copies in multiple places. The fact is that WeLib is not allowing other libraries like Anna's Archive to mirror or copy their exclusive collection, hence the recommendation not to use them. Otherwise, please explain how I am missing your point.
- carlosjobim 1y agoNo honour among thieves.
- vlade11115 1y agoAlso, they provide a torrents list that anyone can seed and be part of the long-term preservation. https://annas-archive.org/torrents https://annas-archive.org/torrents
- aniviacat 1y agoI'm surprised i2p torrents are still not popular enough to be offered as an option by sites like this. I'd assume there are many people who don't help out purely because of legal fears, something i2p could help with.
- gylterud 1y agoWhat is the status on I2P these days? I used to run a lot of stuff on it. It was a lot of fun. It was like this cozy alternative development of internet, where things still felt like 1997.
- 6jQhWNYh 1y agoI2P's major drawback when torrenting is speed. Assuming a speed of 500 kbps, it would take 2,000 days to download a 10 TB torrent.
- mk_stjames 1y agoInteresting to see that sci-hub is about 90TB and libgen-non-fiction is 77.5TB. To me, these are the two archives that really need protecting because this is the bulk of scientific knowledge - papers and textbooks. I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives. I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable. The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.
- ofou 1y agoShadow libraries maintainers deserve a Nobel prize for their contributions to humanity. Satoshi would be proud.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sleepyguy 1y agoPerhaps he could spare a few coins, chump change to him to help out.
- xlbuttplug2 1y agoMight need more than a few as the price would tank if his wallets came out of dormancy.
- aitchnyu 1y agoSuperman will freak out the world if he kills so he doesnt. Does Satoshi want to avoid freaking out the BC holders?
- xlbuttplug2 1y agoIn this particular case, it would be like sending a cheque to somebody knowing it would bounce.
- jancsika 1y agoSatoshi's pride: * ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship * lists with a single item still count as lists
- skeaker 1y agoTo be fair, the theory with the whole coin thing is solid, and I'd say it should count as something to be proud of even if in reality it gets tainted by speculative investments.
- justin66 1y ago"Anna’s Archive itself has organized some of the largest scrapes: we acquired tens of millions of files from IA Controlled Digital Lending" Not really helping in the big picture, here, guys.
- Palomides 1y agoyeah, that's a really unfortunate shoutout that's going to be brought up in court.
- om8 1y agoWhy? They acquired books, that’s what they do
- kleiba 1y agoThe OP is referring to the ongoing legal struggles the IA is facing wrt. to their version of an online library (with digital book lending).
- justin66 1y agoPrecisely. To be clear, I don't agree with a comment upthread saying the "shoutout" is what might potentially do harm to the IA in court. I think the actual act of having scraped all those books from the IA's lending system could potentially do harm to the IA in court. The publishers can now point to all the copies of the books in the wild that IA had in their lending system and argue that IA's system is not legally acceptable. It was on shaky enough ground already.
- Nemo_bis 1y agoI believe this was already brought up in the court proceedings, and Brewster Kahle already addressed it in April 2024: «Trying to blow protections we have put on files, for instance, does not help us– and usually hurts». https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bswhdj/comment/kxm65da/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bswhdj/commen...
- whirlwin 1y agoJust curious - What is the future of service like these? More and more content will be AI generated, to some degree. And should thereby that content be aggregated?
- curvaturearth 1y agoPretty sure no one wants AI slop stored away forever even though that's the unavoidable future
- thimabi 1y agoIn the future, the curation function of libraries will become even more important. Libraries — even bookstores —, both physical and online, will probably use as competitive advantage their capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff. There's no value to a place where AI slop is prevalent.
- akkad33 1y agoNot sure like between books and AI
- cakealert 1y agoCan Anna's Archive claim to be a non-profit when it's effectively an illegal enterprise with unknown controllers? They are even offering decent bounties: https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archive/-/issues/ https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv... Whoever is running it must be doing really well for themselves laundering all that crypto. Also interestingly they don't offer a tor onion service, while the admin is most certainly technically competent to administer one given that he no doubt uses tor to insulate himself from his enterprise and launder crypto. What is the reasoning for that?
- teraflop 1y agoYour comment seems like a non sequitur to me. Whether something is a "non-profit" has nothing to do with whether it receives or spends money. (See, e.g. the American Red Cross's ~$4B/yr budget.) It's about what it does with the money it has. Obviously, since Anna's Archive is breaking the law, it can't conform itself to the normal legal/regulatory system that governs non-profit organizations. It can certainly still claim to be acting in the spirit of a non-profit, and it's up to you to decide whether you trust that claim. Nobody's forcing you to give them money.
- cakealert 1y agoThe connotation of a non-profit is that it's being audited. It would be extremely silly to suggest otherwise.
- teraflop 1y agoIt may have that connotation to you, but in general (at least in the US) non-profit organizations are not required to have independent audits. Typically, that requirement only happens if they receive a certain amount of government funding. An organization may choose to undergo audits in order to make people feel better about donating to it. I really, really don't think that anybody is being fooled or misled into thinking that Anna's Archive is a "legitimate" audited organization when they describe themselves as a non-profit.
- 1y ago
- renewiltord 1y ago[flagged]
- freefaler 1y agoBTW, this is very useful: https://open-slum.org/ https://open-slum.org/
- japaget 1y agoThis site is down or inaccessible to me. What is in it and why is it useful?
- tux3 1y agoThat site has a list of shadow libraries, whether they are still operating, and where to find them.
- sMarsIntruder 1y agoIt seems to be an instance of Uptime Kuma, which is a pretty great OSS for uptime monitoring and Dashboarding. https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
- iLoveOncall 1y ago> In recent weeks we’ve seen increased attacks on our mission. A pretty rich thing to say when your mission is piracy. I'm not against piracy at all, quite the contrary, but this is quite laughable.
- sandspar 1y agoIt's an interesting peek into their milieu. For those in the club, the statement might seem self-evident.
- mavamaarten 1y agoRight? I mean I love what they're doing. But at the same time please, stop claiming to be holy angels trying to build an archive for historical purposes. You're a terrific piracy site, period.
- vixen99 1y agoWhat is it then that they love doing? Is there a long-term thrill in being a piracy site? I don't think so. No truth in the angel story but they do say "it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form".
- iLoveOncall 1y ago> What is it then that they love doing? They're earning a fuck ton of money, that's what they're doing. Just like megaupload back in the days, they sell premium accounts for fast download speeds and no queue.
- IAmBroom 1y agoIf you do good, and also make money doing it, are you somehow bad?
- kelnos 1y agoI mean, you don't personally know any of them, do you? How could you possibly know what their motivations are? And even if their motivations are less than pure, I will 100% get behind the mission of preserving humanity's literary output. If that's the outcome, I don't care about their motivations.
- jimsimmons 1y agoDoes anyone have discreet pointers for downloading all the data? What format is it usually?
- throawayonthe 1y agohttps://annas-archive.org/datasets https://annas-archive.org/datasets
- jimsimmons 1y agoAlso how can one totally anonymously pay them?
- squigz 1y agoIt doesn't look like they accept from anything that strikes me as being remotely anonymous, which is surprising. https://annas-archive.org/donate https://annas-archive.org/donate I'll also say that when too much money starts becoming a part of this, trouble will increase dramatically. I realize this sort of endeavor costs a lot of time and money, but it's a line we should probably be aware of.
- mquander 1y agoThey accept Monero which would be my first thought.
- neilv 1y agoPeople like this, because people like free stuff, and like to rationalize getting free stuff. Occasionally, someone who likes free stuff styles themself a freedom fighter, though their values do not otherwise seem to extend beyond getting free stuff. Some AI company techbros like this data trove even harder, and limit their pretending to publicly saying things like "we're changing the world" (and "AI could be bad if you don't give us money and lock out competitors") but really only care about wealth and power. Certain sanctioned countries that culturally value literature and science might also appreciate this. (This last category, I'm much-much more sympathetic to, and wish them well in their intellectual pursuits and appreciation of the humanities, though we should really find a better way to share that doesn't undermine Western economies and many people's livelihoods.)
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoDon't forget the video piracy thread had a lot of justification to the effect of 'the people that work on these shows/movies don't get paid enough anyways, so it's ok for me to pirate'. Wait, so you think they should get paid more for their work, this what they do is worth being paid for, just not by you? Weirdest flex.
- skeaker 1y agoYou've just made this person that you're arguing against up.
- neilv 1y agoNo, I've absolutely seen that argument made online as justification for music and movie piracy, many times, for many years. People rationalizing aren't mental giants. Piracy is generally by people who want free stuff. Not by philosophers who arrived at piracy through some line of reasoning other than wanting free stuff. The dialogue in the space is what you'd expect.
- skeaker 1y agoLink it.
- gandalfian 1y agohttps://kmr.annas-archive.org/blog/an-update-from-the-team.html https://kmr.annas-archive.org/blog/an-update-from-the-team.h...?
- lolive 1y agoI choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town. So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY knows it exists. Am I an exception? I don't know but those services are great to maintain a freedom of choice.
- Phelinofist 1y agoCan you recommend some of the obscure stuff?
- lolive 1y agoOk, there are not only obscure stuff. More blasts from the past, that really would deserve a better exposure. In term of non-Marvel/DC comics, things from Bernie Wrightson, P Craig Russel, George Besse, Alberto Breccia, Moebius, Druillet, Scuitten/Peeters, and others. In term of letters, once again the almight Lovecraft letters are really jaw-dropping ! For movies, I discovered Vincent Price, Sam Peckimpah, John Ford, Wim Wenders. So nothing really out of the "normality", but they are no longer marketed and are slowly fading to grey.
- epiccoleman 1y agoBernie Wrightson's is beyond awesome, fills me with nostalgia for a time I never lived through. The Roots of the Swamp Thing collection is really fun and serves as a fantastic hors d'oeuvre for reading the famed Alan Moore run.
- sersi 1y agoI'm exactly the same. I tend to get the first book of any series that interests me and read a third before I decide whether to buy it or not. I do buy about 3-4 books a month (mostly epub drm free preferred) plus about 10 european graphic novels (paper books only) a month so I'm a heavy consumer I think.
- raybb 1y agoTheir volunteering system seems pretty well organized. Also might explain why I've seen so many comments over the years sharing about anna's archive. https://annas-archive.org/volunteering https://annas-archive.org/volunteering
- brianstorms 1y agoFuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.
- dd_xplore 1y agoI think they shouldn’t publish books which are fairly new. Hurts the authors…
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gaudystead 1y agoI'm sorry you feel that way and it's understandable to be frustrated by them allowing piracy of something you've worked so long on. That being said, do you know if their offering of your material has had a significant impact on your revenue or is it more the principal of the matter?
- IAmBroom 1y ago"I coulda been somebody! I coulda been a contender!"
- shortstuffsushi 1y agoThis strikes me as a bit ironic, if you're serious, as you list your current work as covering the entirety of the Beatles discography. Are you paying them for the rights?
- pavel_lishin 1y agoI don't think this is a useful path to go down; there's a legal precedent for cover songs, and perhaps he did pay the fee: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-when-mechanical-royalty-due-28002.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-when-mechan...
- mightysashiman 1y agoremember guys, it's not pirating, it's gathering date from AI model training purposes. Perfectly legal.
- ijk 1y agoI know you're joking, but what the AI training lawsuits have said so far is that training and digitizing used books that you bought is fair use, but piracy isn't.
- abenga 1y agoFor "you" as a natural person. Companies are legally free to download books for free to train AI.
- mightysashiman 1y agohonestly, the world is becoming such a joke as a whole, that "joke" may well become the new norm.
- layer8 1y agoThat would be a valid argument if they weren’t redistributing the data verbatim.
- kelvinjps10 1y agoI'd like that they enable torrents for single files, like internet archive does waiting too long for being able to download a file It's kind of annoying
- episode404 1y agoThey won’t do that. How else are they supposed to sell these premium subscriptions?
- hinkley 1y agoI was reading a book series from my local library and for reasons I don’t understand they were missing the third or fourth book in the series. Probably damaged or lost. I even thought I could check the local (especially used) bookstores, buy a copy and then gift it to the library, but there’s a new edition that has a completely different vibe and size, with 2024 prices so I thought better of it. So I’d heard of Anna’s Archive and I got it there. Then it turned out one of the last books was unavailable too, can’t recall if it was missing or someone else had it out and wasn’t going to return it any time soon. I was just trying to finish this writer’s corpus on a reread of their later material. It’s not that I’m cheap. I own a paper and audiobook copy of several of my favorite books. Including this author, so I’ve paid her twice. I just avoided the trap some of my friends long ago were falling into of hoarding books, by only keeping books I intend to read again. So any completionist tendencies have always been resolved via library or electronic editions. I’m getting older now, and my first real confrontation with my own mortality came up with books. I have several years worth of books even if I were retired and reading three or four a week. New things come out all the time, and new voices. I haven’t read some of these books in ten years or more. Am I really going to read them again before… So a couple years ago I reread Dune for what will likely be the last time and sold my ratty old yellow copies to a used bookstore. If I do it again it will likely be audiobook.
- subscribed 1y agoI was firmly in the anti-audiobook camp until I heard the Dune (don't remember whose adaptation). Amazing experience. I still much prefer books (ebooks, because I can carry thousand to choose from when I inevitably finish the one I read), but I have since listened to several audiobooks and I really like how different yet oddly familiar it is, compared to reading.
- hinkley 1y agoThere are books I feel I should read but never could sit through, and that's where I got started. I'm terrible at picking meter out of poetry, so I tried several times to start Homer and got four pages in before I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Finally listened to it during my daily commute. Did a lot more while landscaping and walking for distance. Now I have a few favorites I just go through repeatedly when doing errands. I had a friend who just ripped the audio track off of her favorite movies for road trips.
- computerdork 1y agoKnow am going to be downvoted into oblivion, but as a composer, can see it from the side of creators. Yeah, making their products free is starving these industries. For instance, in music, there is already very little money in music (think about how many musicians you personally know who can make a living off of music, besides being a music teacher). And, the music industry is still not even the same size as it was in 90's - global revenue in 2024 was $29 billion, while in 1994, in was $35 billion (and that's not even taking into account inflation). Yes, there are many other reason why the music industry fell, but when your main demographic can always go to bittorrent to get their music if prices are too high, then there is only so much you can do with the price of music. Yeah, I remember the 90's, music was huge, and there were so many good bands (Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, REM, White Stripes... Or if you're more into popular music, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston...). Now, music is de-valued and cheap and our music scene has been decimated. Personally, think we should try to find ways to support musicians, writers, thinkers, artists... ... but if you have a different opinion, no worries. But, if you can, give it thought.
- ndriscoll 1y agoThere's also the effect that new musicians are competing for attention with an ever growing catalog of top artists. I already have hundreds of CDs, so I'm not particularly inclined to go find whatever the 2025 version of the Smashing Pumpkins is because I already have the old one. Looking at this year's Billboard 200, I don't think I'd be interested in SZA or Lil Baby. Bowie died almost 10 years ago. I guess I'm good with what I've got.
- computerdork 1y agoDefinitely... and think about your comment, it's probably what we've all heard, that the teens/twenties is the target demographic for the music industry, as they're the one who go out and buy things. Yeah, I don't buy that much music these days, maybe a few songs and albums per year (and I'm in music!).
- dulpo 1y agoI agree with you. There's a huge sense of entitlement from people who pirate, and the most absurd set of excuses. I bet most of them would shoplift if it was consequence free. And then complain that shops were going out of business.
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- phtrivier 1y agoGiven that big tech has been scraping everything ever written to train LLMs, are there specialized prompts to trick models into spitting out copyrighted works ?
- baq 1y agoFoundation LLMs are lossy compressed databases, you might never get the exact work back from it.
- Nemo_bis 1y agoYes, if you believe the New York Times: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/28/the-ny-times-lawsuit-against-openai-would-open-up-the-ny-times-to-all-sorts-of-lawsuits-should-it-win/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/28/the-ny-times-lawsuit-aga...
- pkamb 1y agoDoes Anna's Archive or a similar site host, say, the complete New York Times (pre-1930) as a full PDF download set? And every other newspaper too? Tons of public domain sources are locked into websites like Newspapers.com or the nearly-dead and now completely unsearchable old Google News / Newspaper. It would be nice if the massive pursuit of AI training data resulted in some fully-legal open source alternatives to these proprietary, outdated, or abandoned sites. I know some of it is available via the Internet Archive, etc., but something new with an AI-powered search and finding aid sounds so useful.
- lioeters 1y ago> complete New York Times (pre-1930) https://archive.org/search?query=title%3ANew+York+Times&sort=-date&and%5B%5D=year%3A%5B1530+TO+1930%5D https://archive.org/search?query=title%3ANew+York+Times&sort... > as a full PDF download set I imagine it's possible to achieve this through torrents from Anna's, but you'd have to search and compile the list of all individual PDFs. > something new with an AI-powered search With enough time and willingness, someone could put all the old NYT issues through optical character recognition and convert them to text; then make it available to large language models for semantic search of some kind. Ideally public cultural funds could support the effort as academic research.
- pkamb 1y agoIt just feels like the complete public domain New York Times should be a big deal. Why is it only available via individual issues in the Internet archive? Why hasn't every single story been cut out individually, fully OCR'd, so that it shows up as a top hit on Google? And do that for every public domain newspaper around the country, too.
- tokai 1y agoSciDB DOI lookup has given me dud after dud recently with newer publications. Anyone else experiencing the same?
- senderista 1y agoI think they've paused uploading since 2021 or so, due to the pending case in India.
- tokai 1y agoThat is Sci-Hub. "Sci-Hub has paused uploading of new papers. SciDB is a continuation of Sci-Hub" from the AA front page.
- bastawhiz 1y agoIs there a tool like the one from Archive Team that one could run that helps with their effort?
- Nemo_bis 1y agohttps://annas-archive.org/torrents https://annas-archive.org/torrents
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- denkmoon 1y agoKeep fighting the good fight. Our cultural heritage must be preserved.
- johnjames87 1y ago"attacks on our mission"("our mission" being stealing).
- mdp2021 1y agoThe mission is to give people the tools that enable the mental proficiency that allows to make clearminded statements and avoid skullconcussed ones.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago“This website is blocked European sanctions The Council of Europe has decided that the websites of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik News may no longer be transmitted. The website you are trying to visit falls under this European sanction. VodafoneZiggo is obligated to enforce the sanction and has blocked the website.”
- pergadad 1y agoI too see a block (Belgium) but due to the Brussels business court. That said, your message is funny and completely false, it seems Vodafone. ziggo needs to update their lawyers. The council of Europe is a human rights body based in Strasbourg, broader than the EU. It is a kind of democracy watchdog and has no sanctions or telecoms authority. There is the European council, which is the EU body composed of the 27 heads of government, which indeed has sanctioned Russia today by withdrawing it's broadcasting license (X) but I cannot find any source that says that says that telecoms have to block it's content. And of course this all is not Russia today, but maybe they use some of the same servers, which might explain the question raised here how Anna's Archive keeps the lights on. X https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions-against-russia/ https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions-agains...
- nielsole 1y ago"On 1 March 2022, the Council of the EU [...] by which it is prohibited for “operators to broadcast or to enable, facilitate or otherwise contribute to broadcast, any content by the legal persons, entities or bodies" https://rm.coe.int/note-rt-sputnik/1680a5dd5d https://rm.coe.int/note-rt-sputnik/1680a5dd5d
- PeterStuer 1y ago"The site can't be reached" ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR
- paulnpace 1y agoOrigin is unreachable Error code 523 Been stuck here for a lot of hours now.
- internet_points 1y agoIf there's a book that only has e-book versions on amazon, what is the best way to ensure the author gets money? I'd rather not fill my little apartment with paperbacks, and ordering a paperback and then returning it sounds kind of wasteful. Although I guess I could buy a paperback downtown and drop it off at the used book shop .. What do other people do, when they want to pay authors and read e-books without aiding and abetting Bezos?
- sulandor 1y agomaybe $author has contact information or even a donate button up somewhere
- dirkg 1y agoMeta illegally scraped 80TB of data from Anna's archive, Libgen, Zlib etc. I'm sure other tech giants did too. Without paying them a cent, costing these projects $$$ in bandwidth/hosting etc. when I hear people complain about these projects it just sounds like hypocrisy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- chung8123 1y agoIt is somewhat ironic that these archiving sites are what enable the massive LLM companies to get to where they are. I love the advancements of what people have accomplished but in the back of my conspiracy mind we have just enabled a few people to control a lot of information.
- damhsa 1y agoi recently used this to download a PDF of an industry standard i legally had access to in a DRM-PDF format which i could not open on my computer. completely legal according to local legislation, just as long as the publisher doesn't find out ;-)
- cbility 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250818190311/https://annas-archive.org/blog/an-update-from-the-team.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250818190311/https://annas-arc...
- wortelefant 1y agoI used to download books when I was still in academia and money was more of an issue. These days with a decent salary, I just buy most books on kindle and don't think twice about it, clicking through the download links on these download sites is just too much of a hassle. Sometimes I even download a book I already own again in pdf form, so I can feed it to some GPT prompt as context. I do not think most people would be able to buy the books they download there, and I welcome it as a counter to Amazons DRM policy.
- montag 1y agoIn case the site is down when you read this (as it is now): https://web.archive.org/web/20250819061343/https://annas-archive.org/blog/an-update-from-the-team.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250819061343/https://annas-arc...