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Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)

178 pointsby Cider9986today at 4:51 PM77 commentsview on HN

Comments

ahmedfromtunistoday at 6:09 PM

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.)

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stephenlftoday at 8:09 PM

The only legal hurdle keeping Anna’s Archive away from its noble goal (piracy laws) has been shown to mean zilch in the age of AI.

dr_dshivtoday at 6:56 PM

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…

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trilogictoday at 6:01 PM

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.

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DeepYogurttoday at 6:30 PM

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

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hedoratoday at 6:05 PM

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.

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bix6today at 5:39 PM

Piracy / copyright predictions?

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

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hereme888today at 7:16 PM

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

neilvtoday at 6:07 PM

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.

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anyaya1today at 7:42 PM

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

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wxwtoday at 5:40 PM

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

...

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FerritManstoday at 5:39 PM

So AA is a front for openai?

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stephenlftoday at 7:58 PM

Anna’s archive rocks

OrangeDelongetoday at 6:07 PM

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

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ThrowawayTestrtoday at 5:37 PM

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

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b112today at 5:40 PM

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