# Anna's Archive

Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow libraries that was launched by the pseudonymous Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to shut down Z-Library in 2022. The site aggregates records from major shadow libraries including Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis, among other sources. It calls itself "the largest truly open library in human history", and has said it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form". It claims not to be responsible for downloads of copyrighted materials, since the site indexes metadata but does not directly host any files, instead linking to third-party downloads. However, it has faced government blocks and legal action from publishers and publishing trade associations for engaging in large-scale copyright infringement.

## Origins

Anna's Archive emerged out of the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) project, an anonymous effort to mirror shadow libraries that completed a full copy of Z-Library in September 2022. PiLiMi acknowledged that it "deliberately violated the copyright law in most countries", and its initial focus was on preservation rather than on making its data searchable. Days after US law enforcement seized several Z-Library domains and arrested its alleged operators in November 2022, PiLiMi member Anna (also known as Anna Archivist) launched Anna's Archive, which initially displayed results from Z-Library and Library Genesis.

## Website and operations

Anna's Archive has been variously described as a search engine, a metasearch engine, and a shadow library itself. Its source code is released into the public domain under the CC0 license, and its data is distributed in bulk with torrent files so as to make it resilient to website takedowns. The site does not directly host any files, but it links to external downloads provided by third parties. It also offers downloads through the IPFS protocol.
As of January 15, 2025, Anna's Archive includes 40,369,782 books and 98,401,746 papers, and its unified list of torrents totals roughly one petabyte in size. It lists Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, the Internet Archive, DuXiu, MagzDB, and Nexus/STC among its "source libraries", and Open Library and WorldCat as metadata-only sources. Some of these datasets are already publicly accessible, while others are scraped or otherwise privately acquired for distribution.

### Finances

High-speed downloads on Anna's Archive are only available to users with a paid membership, while nonmembers must use slower options with browser verification to prevent abuse by bots. It describes itself as a nonprofit, claiming that membership fees and donations are mostly spent on server infrastructure and that none are personally used by the site's operators. Memberships and monetary rewards are given to some volunteer contributors.
Anna's Archive offers high-speed access to its full collection via SFTP to groups training large language models in exchange for large contributions of money or data. It said it provided such access to about 30 companies as of January 2025, primarily based in China, including both LLM companies and data brokers. DeepSeek's VL model was trained on data from the site.

## Site blocks and legal issues
### United States

In October 2023, Anna's Archive was reported to have scraped the entirety of WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database, and made its proprietary data freely available, which Anna described as "a major milestone in mapping out all the books in the world". OCLC, WorldCat's maintainer, responded by filing a lawsuit against the site in an Ohio federal court in January 2024, claiming the scrape was achieved through cyberattacks on its servers. It sought over $5 million in total damages and an injunction to stop Anna's Archive from scraping or sharing its data. OCLC clarified that although its internal systems were not breached, it believes the site's actions legally constitute hacking. The only named defendant in the suit denied any involvement with the scrape or Anna's Archive. Technology writer Glyn Moody criticized the suit as "costly and pointless", saying it went against OCLC's stated mission of making information accessible.
In March 2024, a group of authors filed a lawsuit against Nvidia in a California federal court for allegedly training its generative AI platform NeMo on the Books3 dataset, which includes copyrighted data from several shadow libraries, Anna's Archive among them. In the company's response, it disputed the characterization of these sites as shadow libraries, despite Anna's own use of the term.
In July 2024, in the wake of the OCLC lawsuit, the .org mirror of Anna's Archive was replaced with a new .gs mirror to avoid falling under US jurisdiction; however, soon afterward, the .gs domain was suspended and the mirror reverted to the original .org domain.
In February 2025, internal emails were unsealed in a lawsuit against Meta in a California court for allegedly training its AI models on copyrighted materials which revealed that the company had downloaded over 81 terabytes of data through Anna's Archive torrents, in addition to data previously downloaded from Library Genesis. The company argued that its use of this data constituted fair use under US copyright law.
Since 2023, Anna's Archive domains have appeared in the annual Notorious Markets List of the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which highlights digital and physical markets allegedly involved in large-scale intellectual property infringement. These reports describe the site as related to Sci-Hub and Library Genesis. In response to a request for comment by the Office on its 2023 List, the Association of American Publishers identified Anna's Archive as an infringing site, and analyzed its cryptocurrency wallets to find that it had received over $29,000 in funds as of July 2023.

### Netherlands

In March 2024, the Rotterdam District Court ordered major internet service providers in the Netherlands to block Anna's Archive and Library Genesis due to a request by advocacy group BREIN. The order was "dynamic", meaning that if the blocked sites changed domains or IP addresses in the future, ISPs would be obligated to update their blocks.

### Italy

In January 2024, Italy's national communications agency ordered ISPs in the country to block Anna's Archive due to a copyright complaint by the Italian Publishers Association. An investigation by the country's Digital Services Directorate confirmed the presence of copyrighted material on the site and found that some of its servers were likely owned by a Ukrainian hosting provider, but failed to uncover the identity of its operators.

### United Kingdom

In December 2024, the UK Publishers Association won an order from the High Court of Justice requiring major ISPs to block Anna's Archive and other copyright-infringing sites, extending a list of sites blocked since 2015 under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. The Association said it identified over one million records of copyrighted books and journal articles on Anna's Archive domains.

### Other issues

Anna's Archive was among Google Search's ten most reported domains for DMCA takedown as of June 2024. It has been one of the most targeted sites of Dutch anti-piracy service Link-Busters, which sends takedown notices to Google and other search engines on behalf of major publishers.
In January 2025, the messaging app Telegram suspended Anna's Archive and shut down its channel for copyright infringement, despite its operators reportedly taking precautions to avoid infringing posts on the app. Z-Library's Telegram channel was suspended the same week, and neither was alerted of the action. The removals were speculated to be linked to legal action by an Indian court.