https://annas-archive.li/blog/finished-chinese-release.html Anna's Blog Updates about Anna's Archive, the largest truly open library in human history. We finished the Chinese release annas-archive.li/blog, 2025-11-28 TL;DR: We have finally finished the Chinese release which we started 2 years ago. We look at all the work involved. We're happy to announce that the Chinese release which we started 2 years ago (this month) is finally finished. After much work by our group of Chinese volunteers, we finally managed to release and integrate the DuXiu and other Chinese collections. We'd like to give a quick overview of the different subcollections, and the work involved. [1] [2] airitibooks Scrape of `iRead eBooks' (= phonetically `ai rit i-books'; airitibooks.com), by volunteer `j'. cadal CADAL is a collection of ancient books. `bpb9v' explains: "1. CADAL has two building stages, the first one (one million books digitized) from 2001 to 2006 and the second one(1.5 million books digitized) from 2007 to 2012. The library whose download link were sent by "woz9ts" before is from the first stage. 2. This library was downloaded before 2016, by someone named "h". They exploited some loopholes to download. The earliest link I found about this library was posted in April 2015. 3. In this library there are more than 600,000 files, about half of them are books or magazines, the other half is papers. There doesn't seem to be a way to separate them by id. 4. I heard that "h" shared some files downloaded from the second stage in 2021, but I didn't find any other information source for this. Besides, I found a folder called in my cloud drive, which contains many Duxiu books, but I don't know where it comes from." cgiym From our volunteer `cgiym', texts from various sources (represented as subdirectories), including from China Machine Press (a major Chinese publisher). chinese_architecture Scrape of books about Chinese architecture, by volunteer `cm': `I got it by exploiting a network vulnerability at the publishing house, but that loophole has since been closed'. dedao Scrape of China Platform Book Library, by volunteer "qp". duxiu Duxiu is a massive database of scanned books, created by the SuperStar Digital Library Group. Most are academic books, scanned in order to make them available digitally to universities and libraries. For our English-speaking audience, Princeton and the University of Washington have good overviews. There is also an excellent article giving more background: "Digitizing Chinese Books: A Case Study of the SuperStar DuXiu Scholar Search Engine". The books from Duxiu have long been pirated on the Chinese internet. Usually they are being sold for less than a dollar by resellers. They are typically distributed using the Chinese equivalent of Google Drive, which has often been hacked to allow for more storage space. Some technical details can be found here and here. Though the books have been semi-publicly distributed, it is quite difficult to obtain them in bulk. We had this high on our TODO-list, and allocated multiple months of full-time work for it. However, in late 2023 an incredible, amazing, and talented volunteer reached out to us, telling us they had done all this work already -- at great expense. They shared the full collection with us, without expecting anything in return, except the guarantee of long-term preservation. Truly remarkable. The DuXiu torrents and filepath contain the PDF files which have been converted from the original ZIP files. Part of this conversion has been done using our pdgconvert tool, which was adapted from code by volunteers. The files which were already in an approprate format (such as PDF, EPUB, or DJVU) were included in different "upload" torrents subcollections, dataset descriptions and filepaths. [pdgconvert] duxiu_epub DuXiu epubs, directly from DuXiu, collected by volunteer `w'. Only recent DuXiu books are available directly through ebooks, so most of these must be recent. duxiu_ts More DuXiu files in the "TS*" format (newer files), scraped by volunteer "w". gxds_epub Volunteer "woz9ts" explains: "Guo Xue Da Shi Zi Yuan Ku is https:// www.guoxuedashi.net/. This website has a good collection of ancient books. It released many versions of local book readers (with encrypted metadata and fulltext databases). I have found a way to extract the key and decrypt the databases. My "gxds" collection covers the Guo Xue Da Shi Zi Yuan Ku /Ruan Jian folder." huafuzhi Scrape of huafuzhi.com, by volunteer "w". Mainly published by c-textilep (China Textile Publishing). huawen_library Scrape of Tai Wan Hua Wen Dian Zi Shu Ku (Taiwan e-Book), by volunteer "bl". Volunteer "bpb9v" notes: "I think the private community in Guoxuedashi scraped this before. I saw a collection on a book seller's site." longquan_archives Selected judicial archives of Longquan, provided by volunteer `c'. Some metadata is available in index for Longquan archives.xls, and more information in instruction.txt. ptpress Scrape of Posts & Telecom Press by volunteer "w". sciencereading Scrape of ScienceReading, by volunteers "qp", "w", and "ma". "qp" explains: "In August 2024, there was an unprecedented vulnerability on the website. We arranged about 30 people to crawl it. shanghai_library_ancient Ancient books from Shanghai Library. zjjd Scrape of ZJJD.cn, by volunteer "w". More info: [1]. Many books are only a preview version and have therefore only metadata. "w" decrypted ".zjjd" extension to ".pdf", using AES password "xSeZw1dY2HKAj3yk". shuge Combined collections of shuge.org by volunteers `cgiym' and `woz9ts'. shukui_net_cdl Scrape of Shukui.net, a Chinese shadow library with a peculiar way of distributing and encrypting files. We speculate that the decryption site jyjl.org is run by the same person but kept separate to avoid legal issues. We managed to get their "secondary library" (CDL, Chinese Digital Library, Zhong Guo Shu Zi Tu Shu Guan , built by National Library of China). The "primary library" still remains to be done, though it seems to have signficant overlap with our existing "DuXiu" collection. Volunteer "bpb9v" explains: "They never mentioned the full name of this library but "Zhong Shu ". I guess it refers to "Zhong Guo Shu Zi Tu Shu Guan (Chinese DIgital Library, CDL)". This library is built by a company that belongs to the national library. Sometimes it's called "Zhong Shu Shu Wu (CDL Book Room)"." sklib Metadata scrape of China Social Science Library, by volunteer "w". Someone still needs to scrape the actual files. SuperStar_Journals SuperStar is the company behind DuXiu. `bpb9v' explains: "SuperStar Journals(Chao Xing Qi Kan ): These journals can be read in links like https:// epubf.5read.com/qikan/ZYJC/ZYJC202201/index.html and the original PDF file can be downloaded in https://epubf.5read.com/qikan/ZYJC/ ZYJC202201/files/extfile/ebook.pdf. ZYJC is the abbreviation of Zhong Guo Zhong Yi Ji Chu Yi Xue Za Zhi (in Pinyin). 220101 means issue 1 in 2022." twlibrary Scrape of a shadow library "Tai Wan Tu Shu Guan Guan Cang Shu Ji (2T)", by volunteer "woz9ts". It looks like it comes from these official sites [1] [2]. We combined metadata from Tai Wan Te Cang Yu Lan .zip and [(Xin )] Tai Wan Te Cang Mu Lu .xlsx. We converted files to PDFs but also kept the original .zip files (since some didn't convert properly). WenQu WenQu Classics Library(Wen Qu Jing Dian Tu Shu Guan ). `bpb9v' explains: "This site is inaccessible now, because someone (probably book sellers) scraped too much data in a short time. There are about 80k PDF files, and 4k epub (and a few mobi) files. All pdf files are on the official site therefore inaccessible now. But epub files are stored on Aliyun server. They're all uploaded." woz9ts Collections from volunteer `woz9ts': program-think, haodoo (additional metadata and code: [1] [2] [3]), skqs (by Dizhi(Di Zhi ) in Taiwan; in two places: [1] [2]), mebook (mebook.cc, Wo De Xiao Shu Wu , my little bookroom -- woz9ts: `This site mainly focused on sharing high quality ebook files, some of which are typeset by the owner himself. The owner was arrested in 2019, and someone made a collection of files he shared.'). Mo Fang Xin Fang Zhi 45616 Volunteer "woz9ts" explains: "Mo Fang Xin Fang Zhi 45616 is a important collection. Fang Zhi is a type of book, that contains history, economy, agriculture, geography, culture, and other commentaries about a town/ county. These are compiled every few decades by the local government. XFZ means Xin (new) Fang Zhi . Mo Fang is a digital library." Data seems to be stitched together from smaller PDFs (see './Jiang Su Sheng /XFZ20651.<> Di Yi Ce (Zong Shu , Da Shi Zhuan Ji , Di Li , Ren Kou , Huan Bao )/combin.bat'), and pdf content creator seems to be 'pdftk'. All seem to be generated around Aug 11, 2020. Filenames in duxiu_main2/Mo Fang Xin Fang Zhi 45616 are matched to Wanfang's titles. Guo Xue Da Shi Zi Yuan Ku /guji Related links [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. More information can be found on the pages for Duxiu Dataset, Duxiu Torrents, Upload Dataset, Upload Torrents, Other Metadata Dataset, Other Metadata Torrents. Thanks so much to all the volunteers for their hard work. Of course, more is always coming. This work is never done. - Anna and the team (Reddit)