[HN Gopher] Anna's Archive: Open-source data library
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Anna's Archive: Open-source data library
Author : janandonly
Score : 498 points
Date : 2023-06-30 04:55 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annas-archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (annas-archive.org)
| pilimi_anna wrote:
| Anna here. Thanks for the support and feedback in these comments!
| culi wrote:
| Really cool archives. Another project you might wanna check out
| is DocuWiki (not to be confused with DokuWiki the software). It
| often gets looked over because it leverages the Ed2k network
| but it's often been the only source I've found for certain rare
| documentaries
|
| https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages
|
| Thanks kindly for your work
| qingcharles wrote:
| Great link, thank you. I'd not heard about this wiki before.
| Now I'm going to lose more time I don't have to spare
| watching some documentaries.
| glietu wrote:
| Well, sometimes it's better to have best kept secrets as ...
| secrets. Don't wanna lose this, after what happened to zLib.
| nanny wrote:
| For real. Please delete!
| pilimi_anna wrote:
| Opsec + open source > gatekeeping
| jacooper wrote:
| Zlib is still live btw
| beefield wrote:
| I kind of understand many of the books in the front page, but is
| there a message for example in harry potter or game of thrones
| that I do not get?
| theptip wrote:
| "We have the popular copyrighted stuff too"?
| iguana_lawyer wrote:
| Recent attempts in the United States to ban books and close
| libraries has made sharing books without concern for copyright
| law a moral imperative.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I think Aaron Swartz would love this effort.
| cafiw41133 wrote:
| [dead]
| cafiw41133 wrote:
| [dead]
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't get it, on the frontpage you have books like "Harry
| Potter", I'm fairly sure that's not open source or even available
| for free distribution. It also seems counter intuitive that you
| get preferential treatment if you login, why would that be the
| case, if it's truly open?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _free_
|
| Actually, per the meaning of its own name, is / _daring_ /
| ("per-ya", ex PIE for "to try, risk").
| foobarbecue wrote:
| https://youtu.be/i8ju_10NkGY
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "it also seems counter intuitive that you get preferential
| treatment if you login"
|
| what preferential treatment is that
| jer0me wrote:
| > Fast downloads from our partners (requires logging in)
|
| https://annas-
| archive.org/md5/224c5b1195fd2fb4650c3b75c2908d...
| ftxbro wrote:
| oh that's weird are they honeypotting me like if I try to
| fast-download harry potter the intellectual property police
| will come at me for violating the wizarding world extended
| universe franchise
| yard2010 wrote:
| I think it lies in the jurisdiction of the books police.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I would expect a nasty letter delivered by an owl,
| followed by a visit by a stern gandalf looking mf flanked
| by two furries guards each seven feet tall and armed with
| a different medieval polearm
| deepnet wrote:
| Dementors to take one to Azkhaban
| [deleted]
| vidyesh wrote:
| In this case open-source does not mean only open-source books.
| Anna's Archive is a shadow library, they also maintain a pirate
| library mirror. So you can think of them like an anarchist(?)
| archivist?
|
| I think only the high-speed direct downloads require logging-in
| but other downloads and torrents are freely available.
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
| mrweasel wrote:
| Okay, but isn't Project Gutenberg the true open source
| library, without the risk of me misunderstanding the
| licensing and violating copyright?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Project Gutenberg has been fought (censored, blocked, sued)
| by statal entities, like germany and italy - it may happen
| because of occasional improper insertions, or because of
| local legislation inconsistent with that which the Project
| references, or because of bestiality of the attacker.
| ddeck wrote:
| The Internet Archive might be better example, depending on
| your definition of open. They have over 4 million books
| archived. I believe Project Gutenberg have around 70k.
|
| The Internet Archive include books still in copyright,
| which can be read by "borrowing" them virtually.
|
| https://archive.org/details/internetarchivebooks
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _which can be read by "borrowing"_
|
| Reminder: based on the idea that "if the library holds a
| physical copy it can lend an electronic view over it,
| respecting the same principle of the physical object,
| i.e. one user per item per period (i.e. one user per use
| instance)". Such principle is being fought.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Violating copyright is the whole point. The contention of
| this archive seems to be that Project Gutenberg is in fact
| _not_ "open," because it's constrained by its adherence to
| copyright laws.
| jug wrote:
| Weird definition of "open source".
|
| "It's open because we violated copyright and uploaded it
| in the open."
|
| Call it what it is. Pirated books. People that must use
| them still will but at least now we'll know what it is.
| mistermann wrote:
| None of us approved or were even asked our opinion on
| this design, so I wouldn't get too bent out of shape over
| it.
| Takennickname wrote:
| > Call it what it is. Pirated books.
|
| You're missing the entire argument. The argument here is
| that they are not pirates, because copyright is stifles
| the spread of knowledge and should therefore be
| completely abolished.
|
| Whether you get it or not is something different all
| together. But that's what people are fighting for.
| gjvc wrote:
| this is a good example of the difference between
| "understanding" and "agreement" :-)
| agumonkey wrote:
| Where do they discuss the topic ? as much I loved zlib ..
| I cannot forget that copyrights is what allows knowledge
| to be spread most of the time. If people couldn't at
| least live from their writing (not even make a big
| profit) how else would book emerge ?
| abeppu wrote:
| Somewhere, a publisher is giggling as they change the
| constants in problems in an otherwise unchanged first
| semester physics book with an upcoming new edition.
|
| I think a lot of good books never pay their authors much,
| at least in proportion to the effort that goes into
| researching and writing them. Scihub was also violating
| copyright, but academic paper authors don't get paid by
| publishers; they the journals. Lots of intellectual labor
| goes into producing a good where the author would much
| rather you read it without paying than buy it but not
| read it.
|
| This is all to say, the publishers, who are perhaps no
| longer needed in the 21st century, are sales motivated,
| but there's at least a substantial category of authors
| who are not.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Fair point, maybe it's about rebalancing the system more
| than going fully one way.
| vidyesh wrote:
| The idea of a shadow library is to disseminate knowledge to
| everyone, to provide easy access to readily available
| content which is made inaccessible through paywalls,
| copyright, or other similar barriers.
|
| At inception, these databases were created to make academic
| content freely available which generally does not
| compensate the original publishers. But now it has been
| expanded to support the knowledge for free movement.
|
| The legal status is questionable as creators can provide
| their own content to such libraries but their publishers
| might not agree to it.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| An anarchivist!!
| _shadi wrote:
| how different is it then from libgen?
| TeddyDD wrote:
| I don't get why there is a DMCA form: https://annas-
| archive.org/copyright
| lostmsu wrote:
| Wasting resources of copyright owners?
| jrflowers wrote:
| > why would that be the case, if it's truly open?
|
| Traffic management would make sense.
| maxiwer wrote:
| What's the point of these kind of "Free books"? It would be
| better if we could organize something like real book exchanging
| worldwide.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Why would you post this question online rather than simply
| writing it in a nice card and sending it to me?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean libraries are a thing, but it's a logistics problem. My
| local library has thousands of Dutch language books, how is an
| expat or student in the US going to get to them? And that's
| between two countries with good relationships and transport
| links - although said transport is prohibitively expensive for
| the vast majority of people.
|
| Consider another argument: book bannings are a thing in the US
| again, a facist practice [0]. Making these banned books
| accessible to all despite the bans is a clear anti-facist
| statement and move.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-
| amer...
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _book bannings are a thing ... again_
|
| You may have missed a t-shirt photographed a couple of days
| ago, on a demonstrator, going along the lines of "We do not
| delegate education to the state" (oblivious of the principle
| that schools are there to fix the issue of faulty parental
| education, and conversely parents orient the children which
| are necessarily exposed to the world). it is from a group
| that demands censorship - it counts over 100'000 members. I
| understood they are also those who want the genitals of
| Achilles and Hector covered on Greek urns (or them urns
| hidden altogether from culture, "what is their use").
|
| And of course, each similar group has a different set of
| "books to burn".
| vorpalhex wrote:
| There are some books for which official ebooks don't exist..
| but those ebooks appear on Anna's archive. And they are well
| done conversions, not just OCR copies.
|
| There are books on the archive that do exist in real life but
| are _extremely_ rare or may as well not exist.
|
| I'm lucky enough to have a real dead tree library in my home
| but I still use ebooks heavily, and often duplicate books in
| both collections.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Kindly present your arguments explicitly, because it is unclear
| what you mean - why this would be unimportant, why that more
| important etc. We cannot invest hours trying to reconstruct a
| "best interpretation".
| _ink_ wrote:
| I was in a Kindle Book Club some years ago. The idea was to pay
| a little fee, from which books are centrally bought. Which
| books to buy was decided by voting. The books then would be
| shared with the members. There were never more concurrent users
| than copies purchased.
|
| Buuut, apparently that violates some TOS and Amazon was
| terminating the accounts. So it's back to the shadow libs.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| This is an amazing resource for students in e.g. rural Africa.
| They do not have access to physical libraries like you would.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _like you would_
|
| Like many would. Do not take libraries for granted - not even
| in "rich" countries.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Indeed, and even if you do have access to a library, due to
| logistics / volume, they only represent a fraction of the
| available knowledge worldwide.
|
| If they offer internet access though, AND if projects like
| these are still around, the access to information is
| infinite.
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| Are you really asking what's the points of making almost any
| book freely available online?
|
| This is extremely valuable to anyone who ever needed a book but
| could not easily get it for whatever reason.
|
| You're free to contact book clubs from all over the world to
| locate and trade paper ones with you if you're not in a hurry,
| but you obviously don't depend on getting the ressource fast,
| reliably or at all.
| cafiw41133 wrote:
| [dead]
| mdp2021 wrote:
| And the first available text is
|
| David K Levine; Michele Boldrin - Against Intellectual Monopoly
| (2008)
|
| > _So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual
| monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free
| market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our
| doorsteps_
| defrost wrote:
| Plenty of others to tickle the norms; eg two editions of, and
| commentary on:
|
| _Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered_ (1975)
|
| ~ E.F. Schumacher "Small is Beautiful is E.
| F. Schumacher's stimulating and controversial study of world
| economies. This remarkable book is as relevant
| today and its themes as pertinent and thought-provoking as when
| it was first published thirty years ago. Small is
| Beautiful looks at the economic structure of the Western world
| in a revolutionary way. Schumacher maintains that
| Man's current pursuit of profit and progress, which promotes
| giant organisations and increased specialisation, has in fact
| resulted in gross economic inefficiency, environmental
| pollution and inhumane working conditions.
| Schumacher challenges the doctrine of economic, technological
| and scientific specialisation and proposes a system of
| Intermediate Technology, based on smaller working units,
| communal ownership and regional workplaces utilising local
| labour and resources."
|
| https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Small+is+Beautiful
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Schumpeter pointed out that innovation is rarely the result of
| free market regimes but instead of monopolistic competition. A
| situation in which individual winners temporarily capture
| markets and use high surplus returns to fund fundamentally
| expensive innovation. In dynamic economies usually a handful of
| firms dominate in the medium term. They're replaced across
| time, they don't compete in the same space. More and more
| complex and developed economies naturally move towards this
| because progress requires immense capital.
|
| Under conditions of extremely free markets firms profits are
| reduced due to competition, consumers capture immediate value,
| but the sectors remain stagnant. An example are many service
| industries.
|
| This also applies to open source software. it is by its nature
| extremely competitive and as a result almost all value is
| captured by its users. This is great at any given point in
| time, but it also means that open source software is constantly
| underfunded, and research is in fact ironically driven by
| surpluses of large firms.
| noduerme wrote:
| "Monopolistic competition" only exists between states at war,
| since any "monopoly", by definition, has no competition in
| the same _polis_.
|
| Willing to confuse cause with effect for a moment, is it true
| that innovation has mainly been the child of centralized
| monopolies competing under their respective wartime
| governments? ...mayyybe... but much of what they did
| militarily was built on the back of peacetime (or at least
| freelance) amateur discoveries by their respective member
| bodies.
|
| That's actually why, supposedly, America "won" the cold war.
| We promoted the birth of Mom's Garage Engineering.
|
| [edit: Strike. "Engineering your home PC in your mom's
| garage" is what I meant to say. And clearly, that more than
| any military/industrial/monopolistic program has made America
| the dominant power in the global technocracy today.]
| Archelaos wrote:
| > ... and use high surplus returns to fund fundamentally
| expensive innovation
|
| We might still see examples of this, but in the more than 70
| years since Schumpeter developed his theories, the financial
| sector as well as state spending (military budget,
| infrastructure, public research, pension funds, etc.)
| expanded a lot. So there are many other sources for large
| capital needs available today.
| theptip wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, found this interesting. Presumably this
| could be quantified/tested empirically? Are you aware of
| evidence in favor? What would be the strongest case against
| this position?
|
| Presumably there are NBER papers etc arguing this to death,
| but I don't know the literature.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| You mean softwares VLC, Linux, Python all came out of a
| monopoly position?
|
| Or maybe you mean great greater than life concepts like the
| press, the Web or vaccines have been invented by big
| monopolistic entities?
|
| Or do you mean unicorns like Google, Amazon and Facebook were
| born out of monopoly?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| All effortful "culture" comes from surplus. And investment is
| crucial, not marginal.
|
| Let us not forget that the surplus need not be astronomical
| to create innovation - e.g. some innovative design comes from
| a shop1, some comes from very expensive prototyping. Still
| surplus, but on remote points in the scale.
|
| (1Think of the Rietveld Meubel Makerij - in the picture,
| Gerrit Rietveld is sitting on the prototype of what will
| become the "Rood blauwe stoel" -
| https://www.spectrumdesign.nl/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/06/ger... )
|
| If the circulation of tools is curbed, surely the freedom to
| progress is limited. Comparatively in outcomes to other
| scenarios, that is to be analyzed. But surely a reply to
| Schumpeter should be found in Levine and Boldrin: their work
| is explicit part of the discussion against competing
| theories.
| immibis wrote:
| In modern capitalism, resources are not invested to find
| better ways to create things, but to find better ways to
| lock people out of the things you create until they pay
| you.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| That is incredible insight.
|
| Do you know which schumpter book he write this in?
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Can I suggest that you check, for a first glance and
| orientation, _Schumpeter's View on Innovation and
| Entrepreneurship_ (by Karol Sledzik, Uni Gdansk) - https://
| www.researchgate.net/publication/256060978_Schumpete...
|
| > _In his earlier view (emphasized in The Theory of
| Economic Development, originally published in 1912),
| Schumpeter highlighted the function of entrepreneurs who is
| carrying out new combinations. He viewed the occurrence of
| discontinuous and "revolutionary" change as the core of
| "economic development" which breaks the economy out of its
| static mode ("circular flow") and sets it on a dynamic path
| of fits and starts. Three decades later, in his Capitalism,
| Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter took the view
| that dynamic capitalism was executed to fail because the
| very efficiency of capitalist enterprise would lead to
| monopolistic structures and the disappearance of the
| entrepreneur_
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Schumpeter took the view that dynamic capitalism was
| executed to fail because the very efficiency of
| capitalist enterprise would lead to monopolistic
| structures and the disappearance of the entrepreneur
|
| Which seems to be more or less spot on, except that 'the
| entrepreneur' also includes the lucky few that end up
| with the new monopolies.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Hi J.; I am not sure about your interpretation but if I
| understand correctly, the reply would be:
|
| that <<fail>> refers to the _spirit_ of entrepreneur-
| iality, i.e. the dynamism centered on innovation.
| Schumpeter was called (by Joan Robinson) <<Marx with the
| adjectives changed>>: his idea was that innovation be
| "the driving force of capitalism", but since efficiency
| creates bloat, the lean becomes heavy, the dynamism
| becomes bureaucracy, the "entrepreneur" becomes a
| """manager""" (an insulting label in Sch.), capitalism
| proceeds towards atrophy and finally transforms into
| socialism. In Schumpeter, "entrepreneur" means "the
| dynamic innovator"; the monopolistic phase is that of the
| heavy bureaucracies - that would be the failure. The
| Schumpeterian school (Sch. died in 1950 - crucial time)
| deals consequently with "why socialism did not happen".
|
| If it was you that hit my parent post: I only reported
| that quote to help the poster asking for a bibliography -
| the paragraph contains reference to the two main books,
| with short descriptions left to the writing researcher
| (my own competence on Schumpeter is minimal). I am not
| personally defending their theories.
| justinclift wrote:
| > This is great at any given point in time, but it also means
| that open source software is constantly underfunded, and
| research is in fact ironically driven by surpluses of large
| firms.
|
| Blender seems to be showing a different path?
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| While I wouldn't download books via this website, the search
| engine is excellent! (Better than Amazon and Google.) Could you
| consider adding filtering the results by year? Also, just out of
| curiosity, how much storage does your archive take? I am guessing
| it is in the order of petabytes.
| saxomoose wrote:
| Is this also your go-to since LE action on Zlibrary?
| rjaco31 wrote:
| They removed the public DNS, but z-library is working just fine
| with Tor. I think you even have the .onion url on their
| Wikipedia page.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| zlib is back, singlelogin.re.
| dharmab wrote:
| I love this website. I find lots of obscure texts here I can't
| find anywhere else.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Dumb question: is this legal ?
| hedora wrote:
| The front page of Anna's archive makes it clear they want to
| organize the would's information, and make it universally
| accessible, so no.
|
| The next question is why the courts would say that Anna's
| archive is illegal, but Google is not.
|
| There are some tests around encouraging copyright infringement,
| and Google is very careful to pass those tests despite
| providing extremely similar services over similarly-illegal
| sites.
|
| The mental and legal gymnastics required for all this are
| fascinating. I suggest studying internet IP law.
| tiagod wrote:
| Depends on your jurisdiction (but in most likelihood not)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It could be a greatest lead to know where it may be - places
| where cultivation is a paramount value.
| Mezzie wrote:
| In the US and Canada (the only countries whose copyright law I
| have studied), it is not.
| immibis wrote:
| Blatantly not. Smart question: How much do the politicians who
| made this illegal care about YOUR finances?
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Smart question: How much do the politicians who made this
| illegal care about YOUR finances?
|
| How is that a smart question? You very likely can't name the
| "politicians who made this illegal" because haring others'
| intellectual property without permission has been illegal by
| definition since the beginning of intellectual property.
| immibis wrote:
| Yup. How much do the politicians who created intellectual
| property care about YOUR finances?
| madphilosopher wrote:
| Illegal but not immoral.
| devinprater wrote:
| This is important for blind people too, since a lot of stuff like
| Kindle, Apple Books and such, use DRM. That means that if I
| wanted to read a book on my Braille EReader, without using my
| phone which adds another device, another battery, and so on, I'd
| have to un-DRM the book. Lately though, Kindle have changed their
| DRM stuff so the tools used don't work anymore. So getting them
| from these types of sites; thankfully EPUB versions are
| available, is the only way I can choose what device I read my
| book on.
|
| It's a bit like using emulators to read text from the screen
| using OCR.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I followed the "blog" link in the footer and found some
| interesting posts, like this one [0] about the technical and
| operational details of running the archive.
|
| [0] https://annas-blog.org/how-to-run-a-shadow-library.html
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I was impressed by this part:
|
| > Cloudflare does not accept anonymous payments, so we can only
| use their free plan. This means that we can't use their load
| balancing or failover features. We therefore implemented this
| ourselves at the domain level. On page load, the browser will
| check if the current domain is still available, and if not, it
| rewrites all URLs to a different domain.
|
| Are there any free and open source tools for load balancing
| that rival Cloudflare's paid offerings?
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| No, but there are anonymous bill payment services and pre-
| paid crypto debit cards which support privacy coins like
| Monero.
| Findeton wrote:
| I fully agree with them, copyright is a limited monopoly
| granted by governments. It doesn't have the properties of
| private property, it's an artificial limitation to creative
| work/ideas, which is basically unlimited by nature. It's
| government intervention creating scarcity where there isn't
| scarcity, it's an evil intervention of government on the free
| market.
| [deleted]
| netfortius wrote:
| Is this just to get some HN karma points? Posting here makes
| almost sure another z-lib alternative gets shutdown... :(
| awestroke wrote:
| Yeah. It's such a shame that archiving is a zero-sum game. If I
| archive some books, nobody else can archive them.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Does anyone have the Z-lib Discord that's floating around?
| Contact in profile if you don't want to post it publicly.
| netfortius wrote:
| Sent ...
| rootkea wrote:
| "How to help:
|
| ...
|
| 2. Spread the word about Anna's Archive on Twitter, Reddit,
| Tiktok, Instagram, at your local cafe or library, or wherever
| you go! We don't believe in gatekeeping -- if we get taken down
| we'll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data
| is fully open source."
|
| Source: https://annas-archive.org/about
| netfortius wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35300200
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| It has already been posted here multiple times before.
| netfortius wrote:
| And this (repetitive postings) makes it right ... how?
| pixelbath wrote:
| And sharing the link with other people (a desire stated on
| the website itself) makes it wrong...how?
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