Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is Anna’s Archive? §
Anna’s Archive is a non-profit project with two goals:
- Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.
- Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.
All our code and data are completely open source.
We preserve books, papers, comics, magazines, and more, by bringing these materials from various shadow libraries, official libraries, and other collections together in one place. All this data is preserved forever by making it easy to duplicate it in bulk — using torrents — resulting in many copies around the world. Some shadow libraries already do this themselves (e.g. Sci-Hub, Library Genesis), while Anna’s Archive “liberates” other libraries that don’t offer bulk distribution (e.g. Z-Library) or aren’t shadow libraries at all (e.g. Internet Archive, DuXiu).
This wide distribution, combined with open-source code, makes our website resilient to takedowns, and ensures the long-term preservation of humanity’s knowledge and culture. Learn more about our datasets.
We work with partners to make our collections easily and freely accessible to anyone. We believe that everyone has a right to the collective wisdom of humanity. And not at the expense of authors.
We strongly believe in the free flow of information, and preservation of knowledge and culture. With this search engine, we build on the shoulders of giants. We deeply respect the hard work of the people who have created the various shadow libraries, and we hope that this search engine will broaden their reach.
To stay updated on our progress, follow Anna on Reddit or Telegram. For questions and feedback please contact Anna at Contact email.
How can I help? §
- 1. Follow us on Reddit, or Telegram.
- 2. Spread the word about Anna’s Archive on Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, at your local cafe or library, or wherever you go! We don’t believe in gatekeeping — if we get taken down we’ll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source.
- 3. If you are able, consider donating.
- 4. Help translate our website into different languages.
- 5. If you are a software engineer, consider contributing to our open source, or seeding our torrents.
- 6. If you are a security researcher, we can use your skills both for offense and defense. Check out our Security page.
- 7. We are looking for experts in payments for anonymous merchants. Can you help us add more convenient ways to donate? PayPal, WeChat, gift cards. If you know anyone, please contact us.
- 8. We are always looking for more server capacity.
- 9. You can help by reporting file issues, leaving comments, and creating lists right on this website. You can also help by uploading more books, or fixing up file issues or formatting of existing books.
- 10. Create or help maintain the Wikipedia page for Anna’s Archive in your language.
- 11. We are looking to place small, tasteful advertisements. If you’d like to advertise on Anna’s Archive, please let us know.
- 12. We would love for people to set up mirrors, and we will financially support this.
For more extensive information on how to volunteer, see our Volunteering & Bounties page.
Why are the slow downloads so slow? §
We literally do not have enough resources to give everyone in the world high-speed downloads, as much as we’d like to. If a rich benefactor would like to step up and provide this for us, that would be incredible, but until then, we’re trying our best. We’re a non-profit project that can barely sustain itself through donations.
This is why we implemented two systems for free downloads, with our partners: shared servers with slow downloads, and slightly faster servers with a waitlist (to reduce the number of people downloading at the same time).
We also have browser verification for our slow downloads, because otherwise bots and scrapers will abuse them, making things even slower for legitimate users.
Note that, when using the Tor Browser, you might need to adjust your security settings. On the lowest of the options, called “Standard”, the Cloudflare turnstile challenge succeeds. On the higher options, called “Safer” and “Safest”, the challenge fails.
For large files sometimes slow downloads can break in the middle. We recommend using a download manager (such as JDownloader) to automatically resume large downloads.
Donation FAQ §
How do I upload new books? §
For now, we suggest uploading new books to the Library Genesis forks. Here is a handy guide. Note that both forks that we index on this website pull from this same upload system. If your email address doesn’t work on the Libgen forums, we recommend using Proton Mail (free). You can also manually request for your account to be activated. Note that mhut.org blocks certain IP ranges, so a VPN might be required.
Alternatively, you can upload them to Z-Library here.
To upload academic papers, please also (in addition to Library Genesis) upload to STC Nexus. They are the best shadow library for new papers. We haven’t integrated them yet, but we will at some point. You can use their upload bot on Telegram, or contact the address listed in their pinned message if you have too many files to upload this way.
For large uploads (over 10,000 files) that don’t get accepted by Libgen or Z-Library, please contact us at Contact email.
How do I request books? §
At this time, we cannot accomodate book requests. Please make your requests on Z-Library or Libgen forums. Do not email us your book requests.
Do you collect metadata? §
We do indeed. Our inspiration for collecting metadata is Aaron Swartz’ goal of “one web page for every book ever published”, for which he created Open Library. That project has done well, but our unique position allows us to get metadata that they can’t. Another inspiration was our desire to know how many books there are in the world, so we can calculate how many books we still have left to save.
I downloaded 1984 by George Orwell, will the police come at my door? §
Don’t worry too much, there are many people downloading from websites linked to by us, and it’s extremely rare to get into trouble. However, to stay safe we recommend using a VPN (paid), or Tor (free).
How do I save my search settings? §
Select the settings you like, keep the search box empty, click “Search”, and then bookmark the page using your browser’s bookmark feature.
Do you have a mobile app? §
We don’t have an official mobile app, but you can install this website as an app.
Android: Click the three-dot menu in the top right, and select “Add to Home Screen”.
iOS: Click the “Share” button at the bottom, and select “Add to Home Screen”.
Do you have an API? §
We have one stable JSON API for members, for getting a fast download URL: /dyn/api/fast_download.json (documentation within JSON itself).
For other use cases, such as iterating through all our files, building custom search, and so on, we recommend generating or downloading our ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases. The raw data can be manually explored through JSON files.
Our raw torrents list can be downloaded as JSON as well.
Torrents FAQ §
I would like to help seed, but I don’t have much disk space.
Use the torrent list generator to generate a list of torrents that are most in need of torrenting, within your storage space limits.
The torrents are too slow; can I download the data directly from you?
Yes, see the LLM data page.
Can I download only a subset of the files, like only a particular language or topic?
Most torrents contain the files directly, which means that you can instruct torrent clients to only download the required files. To determine which files to download, you can generate our metadata, or download our ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases. Unfortunately, a number of torrent collections contain .zip or .tar files at the root, in which case you need to download the entire torrent before being able to select individual files.
How do you handle duplicates in the torrents?
We try to keep minimal duplication or overlap between the torrents in this list, but this can’t always be achieved, and depends heavily on the policies of the source libraries. For libraries that put out their own torrents, it’s out of our hands. For torrents released by Anna’s Archive, we deduplicate only based on MD5 hash, which means that different versions of the same book don’t get deduplicated.
Can I get the torrent list as JSON?
Yes.
I don’t see PDFs or EPUBs in the torrents, only binary files? What do I do?
These are actually PDFs and EPUBs, they just don’t have an extension in many of our torrents. There are two places in which you can find the metadata for torrent files, including the file types/extensions:
1. Each collection or release has its own metadata. For example, Libgen.rs torrents have a corresponding metadata database hosted on the Libgen.rs website. We typically link to relevant metadata resources from each collection’s dataset page.
2. We recommend generating or downloading our ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases. These contains a mapping for each record in Anna’s Archive to its corresponding torrent files (if available), under “torrent_paths” in the ElasticSearch JSON.
Do you have a responsible disclosure program? §
We welcome security researchers to search for vulnerabilities in our systems. We are big proponents of responsible disclosure. Contact us here.
We are currently unable to award bug bounties, except for vulnerabilities that have the potential to compromise our anonymity, for which we offer bounties in the $10k-50k range. We’d like to offer wider scope for bug bounties in the future! Please note that social engineering attacks are out of scope.
If you are interested in offensive security, and want to help archive the world’s knowledge and culture, be sure to contact us. There are many ways in which you can help.
Are there more resources about Anna’s Archive? §
- Anna’s Blog, Reddit, Subreddit — regular updates
- Anna’s Software — our open source code
- Translate on Anna’s Software — our translation system
- Datasets — about the data
- .li, .se, .org — alternative domains
- Wikipedia — more about us (please help keep this page updated, or create one for your own language!)
How do I report copyright infringement? §
We do not host any copyrighted materials here. We are a search engine, and as such only index metadata that is already publicly available. When downloading from these external sources, we would suggest to check the laws in your jurisdiction with respect to what is allowed. We are not responsible for content hosted by others.
If you have complaints about what you see on here, your best bet is to contact the original website. We regularly pull their changes into our database. If you really do think you have a valid DMCA complaint we should respond to, please fill out the DMCA / Copyright claim form. We take your complaints seriously, and will get back to you as soon as possible.
I hate how you’re running this project! §
We would also like to remind everyone that all our code and data is completely open source. This is unique for projects like ours — we're not aware of any other project with a similarly massive catalog that is fully open source as well. We very much welcome anyone who thinks we run our project poorly to take our code and data and set up their own shadow library! We're not saying this out of spite or something — we genuinely think this would be awesome since it would raise the bar for everyone, and better preserve humanity's legacy.
Do you have an uptime monitor? §
Please see this excellent project.
Who is Anna? §
What are your favorite books? §
Here are some books that carry special significance to the world of shadow libraries and digital preservation:
Against intellectual monopoly
Cryptonomicon
The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
How Music Got Free
