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.)
I don't understand what this is doing. Can't you sideload any ebook onto a kobo anyway? Never had an issue on my Clara
ahmedfromtunis 19 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, but I don't use e-readers as they are not available here.
I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.
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…
wrsh07 8 minutes ago [-]
Hey, this looks fascinating!
I can't quickly tell what all you have archived^, but I have some friends who are academic historians who might be interested in certain categories of work (and could help verify some esoteric languages) - is it possible to search by region or language?
Have you reached out to any types of historians WRT the project? It seems like some PhD students might be able to find some projects in this work etc
Anyone afraid of being laid off at google right now? Perhaps this is a backup :)
Cthulhu_ 57 minutes ago [-]
I think if you get caught exfiltrating data they'll sue you for much more than $200K.
imhoguy 33 minutes ago [-]
I don't think anybody would do it purely for money. I would rather see someone who is terminally ill and decides to do some "good".
dlenski 12 minutes ago [-]
There are not too many mentally-sharp, fully-employed, terminally-ill people that I have met. Even fewer at tech companies.
And even fewer who are single and childless. (Google would likely go after the estate of anyone who did this.)
merpkz 46 minutes ago [-]
Copy data into extra large capacity micro sdcard and hide it in your rubiks cube, nobody will suspect a thing
diab0lic 28 minutes ago [-]
It’s the “ Copy data into extra large capacity micro sdcard” step that gets you caught. Nobody is stopping you from leaving with an SD card or USB stick at Google.
takipsizad 29 minutes ago [-]
I wish an extra capacity SD card was enough, google books holds (probably) an insane numbers of books
the_real_cher 51 minutes ago [-]
If your money is in private crypto or offshore you have nothing to worry about.
zuzululu 29 minutes ago [-]
i'd strongly caution anybody foolish enough to go down this path
financial watchdogs and international treaties make it impossible unless you are perhaps a multi billionaire who can afford to buy people at the political level
mock-possum 47 minutes ago [-]
Except perhaps jail time.
Lying about your assets to avoid paying a lawful fine is criminal. Just because they can’t see your money doesn’t mean they can’t prove that you have it, and can’t jail you for hiding it to get out paying a fine.
LastTrain 27 minutes ago [-]
So is stealing
LearnYouALisp 33 minutes ago [-]
Google, Amazon, and FB: It's not me, right
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
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.
The link sort of reads like people who have very easy access to the requested material. Almost like they're Google employees.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
Piracy / copyright predictions?
The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
codemog 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully the guillotines. Look up how much the authors and artists who create the actual work get paid.
0x3f 35 minutes ago [-]
Quite a few textbook authors I know are paid well to be part of the whole scheme (kickbacks, forced yearly repurchase for the 'online' component of books, etc). So I think it varies a lot.
specproc 2 hours ago [-]
It was never sustainable, just regulatory capture by large IP owners.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc provided OK value for a while, but now enshitification is biting, this is due a massive comeback.
neilv 2 hours ago [-]
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.
TFNA 53 minutes ago [-]
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 researchers 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.
logicchains 11 minutes ago [-]
>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.
mjburgess 56 minutes ago [-]
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).
LearnYouALisp 30 minutes ago [-]
So when will the American people form an "Incorporation" to lobby against business for them?
WarmWash 20 minutes ago [-]
>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.
1 hours ago [-]
delichon 48 minutes ago [-]
It seems like bounties for new sources of training data would be useful to the big model builders. I follow a guy who hoards vast quantities of old analog media of all kinds, a lot of it local. Bounties could be a way for him to cash in. But I'm not sure if it's an appreciating asset or if they'll find it anyway and it'll lose its value.
> 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
...
Cider9986 15 minutes ago [-]
Up to 500k for OPSEC failures is interesting, as well. It gives me hope that there are wealthy individuals contributing to sharing books, or many small donations.
No, but they openly make a lot of money from selling their library to AI companies. Fast enterprise access to Anna's Archive starts at $100.000
650REDHAIR 1 hours ago [-]
How did you come to that conclusion?
awakeasleep 1 hours ago [-]
the bounty would be a bit higher with openAI money behind it
OrangeDelonge 2 hours ago [-]
Curious as to how you would approach this. I have no experience in this area, anyone on this forum willing to share their expertise?
0x3f 39 minutes ago [-]
If it works as AA seems to theorize, you'd need to:
(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.
takipsizad 15 minutes ago [-]
That way definitely will work with the current access google provides however its an extremely inconvenient way to scrape google books
ThrowawayTestr 2 hours ago [-]
One of my hopes is that when the AI bubble bursts, some brave person will sneak out a copy of the last frontier model.
Aboutplants 2 hours ago [-]
Not worried about that, you will only have to wait 3-6 months and get a Chinese model just as good.
sulam 59 minutes ago [-]
That’s misunderstanding why these models are behind. A large part of why they’re behind is they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps that takes a pre-trained model and turns it into a frontier model like GPT 5 or Opus. Instead they do their best to recreate these models using distillation.
Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier.
[edit, after thinking about it I think my phrasing is unfair. It's not necessarily that aren't able to do it, but they haven't yet shown that they are willing to do it.]
computerex 38 minutes ago [-]
That’s not remotely true. They did distillation as a cheap solution to the cold start problem. You need data/trajectories to hill climb to higher capabilities. All large Chinese labs do RLAIF.
sulam 32 minutes ago [-]
Oh yes, not remotely true. Which is why the frontier labs all have invested heavily in trying to identify and thwart distillers, using known company names / domains to drive their exclusion lists.
/s
logicchains 8 minutes ago [-]
It's cheaper to distill than to do reinforcement learning, so of course they prefer that, but if it wasn't an option they could just pay up and spend more GPU time on RL.
FpUser 38 minutes ago [-]
>"they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps"
Not yet.
If there is a need someone will come and fulfill. Personally for me now I do not even want to use top models. Professionally I use AI to help with the coding using Junie agent that comes with IDEs from JetBrains. Junie is told to use Gemini Flash and works fine for what I ("I" being an emphasis here) ask it to do. I tried more advanced models and different vendors only to discover credits going down the toilet without any extra benefit.
sulam 31 minutes ago [-]
I'll agree I guess and clarify that the better phrasing is probably something like "haven't yet shown the capability to."
yorwba 2 hours ago [-]
Chinese companies giving away expensive models for free is a symptom of the AI bubble, too. It's not a law of nature that they'll always be able to scrounge up the money for yet another training run.
jnwatson 9 minutes ago [-]
As long as it is in the CCP's national interest to have a frontier model, Chinese companies will have the resources for another training run.
gpm 2 hours ago [-]
Shaping the tool that does the thinking is quite valuable when you're in the business of changing how people think - I think we can expect propaganda agencies to be subsidizing model creation forever.
This doesn't strike me as a symptom of a bubble - except in so far as the bubble pushes the competitors models forwards and thus they need to invest more to stay competitive.
rvnx 1 hours ago [-]
All the models, have to respect their local laws, and most of all, pressure from users and the employees.
They all carry political weights, because humans behind defend their interests, and are promoting some social values.
This answer from Claude is so biased that it is ridiculous
nextos 2 hours ago [-]
I think it's a deliberate business strategy of commoditization of their complement.
China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.
fastball 59 minutes ago [-]
If it's a bubble, why do you care about frontier models?
FpUser 35 minutes ago [-]
Internet was a bubble, so was telecom etc. at some point. Being bubble does not mean that when 90% of investments go down the drain the remains are not useful.
thx67 1 hours ago [-]
Prediction markets can solve this.
zuzululu 27 minutes ago [-]
which will be very difficult to run unless you have a large budget to operate your own mini datacenter
2 hours ago [-]
b112 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 19:42:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.)
This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.
I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.
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…
I can't quickly tell what all you have archived^, but I have some friends who are academic historians who might be interested in certain categories of work (and could help verify some esoteric languages) - is it possible to search by region or language?
Have you reached out to any types of historians WRT the project? It seems like some PhD students might be able to find some projects in this work etc
^ when I looked at the timeline https://sourcelibrary.org/timeline, I got an error
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r...
https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r/im_curio...
And even fewer who are single and childless. (Google would likely go after the estate of anyone who did this.)
financial watchdogs and international treaties make it impossible unless you are perhaps a multi billionaire who can afford to buy people at the political level
Lying about your assets to avoid paying a lawful fine is criminal. Just because they can’t see your money doesn’t mean they can’t prove that you have it, and can’t jail you for hiding it to get out paying a fine.
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.
Well, there is this little conflict of interest
The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc provided OK value for a while, but now enshitification is biting, this is due a massive comeback.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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
...
https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier.
[edit, after thinking about it I think my phrasing is unfair. It's not necessarily that aren't able to do it, but they haven't yet shown that they are willing to do it.]
/s
Not yet.
If there is a need someone will come and fulfill. Personally for me now I do not even want to use top models. Professionally I use AI to help with the coding using Junie agent that comes with IDEs from JetBrains. Junie is told to use Gemini Flash and works fine for what I ("I" being an emphasis here) ask it to do. I tried more advanced models and different vendors only to discover credits going down the toilet without any extra benefit.
This doesn't strike me as a symptom of a bubble - except in so far as the bubble pushes the competitors models forwards and thus they need to invest more to stay competitive.
They all carry political weights, because humans behind defend their interests, and are promoting some social values.
https://pastebin.com/hjhvsBFg
This answer from Claude is so biased that it is ridiculous
China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.