I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits.

If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.

Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)

https://SourceLibrary.org has about 16,000 rare books translated — most for the first time. 50,000 books archived (will be translated when we have $$ for it). More tokens than English Wikipedia and about .75 petabytes.

Not sure if we will qualify for a bounty, but happy to share! Btw, we are looking for funding from small or large donors who want to help us translate the Renaissance…

Who is behind Annas archive, there is a lot of english speakers involved in the team and forums! Anyway as long as buying isn´t owning no issues here.

Anyone afraid of being laid off at google right now? Perhaps this is a backup :)

I wonder how long it will be before they offer bounties for internet scrapes.

Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.

Piracy / copyright predictions?

The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.

The link sort of reads like people who have very easy access to the requested material. Almost like they're Google employees.

The US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving".

Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.

We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.

Does Anna's Archive use a completely different "source repository" from LibGen?

Anna’s archive rocks

Some more interesting bounties they offer: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

> Purchase all Library of Congress MARC datasets — $3,000 bounty

> English Wikipedia pages about relevant institutions — up to $100 per new page

> Internet Archive Digital Lending — $5000 per 1 million pdf files

> Text version of our full library — $20,000

...

So AA is a front for openai?

Curious as to how you would approach this. I have no experience in this area, anyone on this forum willing to share their expertise?

  (a) work out how Google books exposes fragments of books, and see if there's a systematic way of using this to get whole books.  For example, a naive approach might be to find any fragment of the book by searching some exact phrase.  Then, you can search for an exact phrase from the start or end of the fragment it gave you, hoping it will show you the previous or next part of the book.  You can then just loop that to get the whole book.

  (b) once you have (a), you need a way of bypassing Google's bot detection/rate limiting.  I don't know what current state of the art is, but there may be a solution for sale out there.  E.g. you pay to receive a cookie or browser state, and use that to fetch the URLs from (a).  Or if you're good/already in the scene, you could do this part yourself.

One of my hopes is that when the AI bubble bursts, some brave person will sneak out a copy of the last frontier model.

This ship has sailed for academic publications, and academics define that term very liberally because we want to read everything, fiction included. The shadow libraries started off as a way for scholars in ex-Soviet countries in particular (but also India, SE Asia, etc.) to access literature that simply wasn’t available in their country. But the shadow libraries proved so successful and convenient that academics in all countries are using them now, even if they have access to official subscription services. I use AA several times a day and so do the researchers around me in my office; at conferences, if the presenter mentions an interesting publication, the whole room immediately opens AA on their laptops, etc.

Even if projects like AA didn’t have nation-level support, academics would find a way to keep as much of it as possible going. After all, we’re the ones who compiled the bulk of pre-2020 material, and we’re the ones who do all the hard work of scanning from our institutional libraries stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere in digital form.

>the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out.

Most of the best literature in the English language was written before modern IP law was even a thing. There's very little good literature written by authors primarily motivated by money.

Possibly but this act of governmental self-harm is useful to The People. We live in a world where if your valuation is ~1T you can more or less just do what you like. And the work of The People is stolen from you and launderd.

In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies?

(Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).

>We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain

We already did that when the internet collectively agreed decades ago that everything digital should be free for anyone.

We're now 20 years downstream of ad-blocking being a virtuous good, and piracy being the ultimate show of liberty, and now suddenly everyone cares about the creator's revenue stream.

The mask slipped and unsurprisingly the internet is a bunch of selfish morally stunted children. Some of them even pushing 50 years old.

Yes, I am talking to you with the 4TB of pirated content, proud of not loading any ads in the last 15 years, and getting enraged over LLM training.