Anna's Archive

Anna's Archive mirrors Library Genesis, Open Library, Sci-Hub and Z-Library and has scraped the library catalog WorldCat.^[5][6][7][8] Anna's Archive says that it does not host copyrighted materials and that it only indexes metadata that is already publicly available.^[3]


As of June 1, 2024, Anna's Archive includes 31,654,583 books and 100,356,641 papers.^[9]

History[edit]

Anna's Archive was founded by the Pirate Library Mirror, a team of anonymous archivists, in direct response to law enforcement efforts to close down Z-Library in 2022.^{[1][3][6][10][11]}


In October 2023, Anna's Archive was reported to have "scraped" (downloaded the entirety of) WorldCat, the world's largest book metadata database. Anna's Archive says that the scrape "marks a major milestone in mapping out all the books in the world" and that it allows them to "work on making a to-do list of all the books that still need to be preserved".^[7][8] In response to the scrape, Anna's Archive was sued in February 2024 by OCLC, one of the maintainers of WorldCat. OCLC says that the scrape was the result of cyberattacks on its servers and that Anna's Archive allows public download of scraped data.^[12] On April 16, 2024, news reported that the only named defendant in the OCLC suit against Anna's Archive denied any involvement with Anna's Archive or in hacking the WorldCat database, suggesting OCLC sued the wrong person.^[13]


In January 2024, Anna's Archive was blocked in Italy due to a copyright complaint by the Italian Publishers Association.^[14] On March 23, 2024, the pirate site blocklist in the Netherlands was reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN,^[15] the Dutch anti-piracy group with links to the Motion Picture Association that had imposed the blocklist on the local internet service providers in 2021.^[16]