Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow libraries that was launched by the pseudonymous Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to shut down Z-Library in 2022. The site aggregates records from Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis (LibGen), among other sources. It calls itself "the largest truly open library in human history", and has said it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form". It claims not to be liable for downloads of copyrighted works since it does not directly host any files, instead linking to third-party downloads. It has nonetheless been targeted for engaging in large-scale copyright infringement, facing government blocks and legal action from rightsholders and publishing trade associations.
History Anna's Archive emerged from the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) project, an anonymous effort to mirror shadow libraries that completed a full copy of Z-Library in September 2022. PiLiMi acknowledged that it "deliberately violated the copyright law in most countries". The project's initial focus was on preservation rather than on making its data searchable. Days after US law enforcement seized several Z-Library domains and arrested its alleged operators in November 2022, PiLiMi member Anna (also known as Anna Archivist) launched Anna's Archive, which initially displayed results from Z-Library and LibGen.
Website and operations Anna's Archive has been variously described as a search engine, a metasearch engine, as well as a shadow library. It operates several mirror sites under different top-level domains. Its source code is dedicated to the public domain under the CC0 license. The site does not host any files (which it claims makes it nonliable for downloads of copyrighted works), instead indexing metadata and links to "third-party" downloads. It also offers downloads through the IPFS protocol.
The site's "source libraries" include LibGen, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, the Internet Archive, DuXiu, MagzDB, Nexus/STC, and HathiTrust; Open Library, WorldCat, and Google Books are listed as metadata-only sources. Some of these datasets are already publicly accessible, while others are scraped or otherwise privately acquired for distribution. They are then released in bulk with torrent files so as to make them resilient to website takedowns. Anna's Archive includes 71,996,952 books and 239,545,528 papers, and its unified list of torrents totals roughly 1.1 petabytes in size.
A 2025 study comparing the coverage of conventional library databases to various alternatives (including scholarly search engines, other web-based databases, academic social networks, and piracy sites) found that Anna's Archive had among the most comprehensive full-text coverage, but criticized it for having an unintuitive interface. In March 2025, it averaged over 650,000 daily downloads, roughly 10 times the estimated distribution of the New York Public Library.
Technology Infrastructure and DDoS protection Anna's Archive uses a multi-layered server architecture designed for resilience against takedowns and outages. According to a 2023 blog post by the site's operators, the backend runs on Flask, MariaDB, and Elasticsearch, hosted on inexpensive servers that are proxied through separate providers to shield the actual hosting infrastructure from legal requests. Multiple redundant proxy servers and application servers are maintained so that if any single provider terminates service, the site can continue to operate.
The site initially used Cloudflare's free tier as an additional caching and DDoS protection layer, taking advantage of Cloudflare's legal position that it acts as a utility rather than a hosting provider and is therefore not directly subject to DMCA takedown requests. However, following court orders associated with the Spotify lawsuit in January 2026, Cloudflare disabled its nameservers for several Anna's Archive domains. At least some of the site's domains subsequently shifted to DDoS-Guard, a Russian DDoS-protection and content delivery provider.
Domain registration Anna's Archive has registered domains through a variety of registrars across multiple jurisdictions. Several of its domains, including its .li and .gl domains, have been registered through Njalla, a privacy-focused domain registration service operated by Njalla SRL in Costa Rica, which registers domains in its own name on behalf of customers to shield their identities.
Data format The site's data is standardized under the Anna's Archive Containers (AAC) format, introduced in August 2023 to allow for incremental releases. Each container consists of metadata and optionally associated binary data. Metadata files use line-delimited JSON compressed with Zstandard, while binary data files are stored alongside them in structured directories. The format is designed to be machine-readable, easy to distribute via torrents, and compatible with the site's existing stack of MariaDB, Elasticsearch, and Python.
Finances Anna's Archive describes itself as a nonprofit, claiming that membership fees and donations are mostly spent on server infrastructure and that none are personally used by the site's operators. It awards memberships and monetary "bounties" to some volunteer contributors.
Account system and download speeds The site operates a tiered download system. High-speed downloads on Anna's Archive are only available to users with a paid membership, with the number of fast downloads permitted per 24-hour period varying by membership tier; multiple memberships can be combined additively. Non-members must use slower options with browser verification to prevent abuse by bots. A waitlist-based system allows free users to access somewhat faster servers by limiting the number of concurrent downloads.
Anna's Archive offers high-speed access to its full collection via SFTP to groups training large language models (LLMs) in exchange for large contributions of money or data. It said it provided such access to about 30 companies (primarily based in China) as of January 2025, including both LLM companies and data brokers. DeepSeek's VL model was partly trained on ebook data from the site. Some lawyers have criticized claims that this constitutes fair use under US copyright law, citing precedent for the importance of market harm.
Donation and payment infrastructure Because of its legal status, the site states that it cannot accept payments through conventional banking channels directly. Instead, it relies on cryptocurrency as well as alternative methods such as Amazon gift cards, Cash App and Alipay. The operators have stated that the need to remain anonymous necessitates avoiding traditional payment processors, and that only a small number of companies support virtual debit cards paid for with cryptocurrency.
Motivation
Anna's Archive has said its objectives are to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form". It has been described as both continuing and greatly extending the ambitions of earlier shadow libraries with its vision of a "universal library" that preserves as many books as possible. It has been interpreted as part of an ascendant "culture of mistrust towards corporations, institutions, governments, and laws... that perhaps began with the financial collapse of 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movements" which saw the rise of decentralizing technologies.
Anna has justified their opposition to copyright on ethical grounds, stating that they "believe that preserving and hosting these files is morally right" and that they and other shadow librarians believe that "information wants to be free". They have suggested that copyright law must be reformed as a matter of national security, proposing that Western countries make legal carveouts for text and data mining so as to remain ahead in the AI arms race.
Anna cites programmer and information activist Aaron Swartz as inspiring the project's collection of metadata. The site recommends Swartz's writings as well as Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free and Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly, which criticize existing copyright law and have been associated with the copyleft movement.
Site blocks and legal issues
Belgium In July 2025, a group of organizations representing Belgian authors and copyright holders – including the Association of Belgian Publishers (ADEB), the Civil Society of Multimedia Authors (La Scam), the Cooperative for the Perception and Compensation of Belgian Publishers (Copiebel), Librius, the Educational and Scientific Publishers Group (GEWU), the General Publishers Ground (GAU), and the Flemish Authors' Association (VAV) – successfully petitioned the Commercial Court to issue judgement against five alleged piracy sites: Anna's Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF. The judge ordered FPS Economy's anti-piracy service to block the sites in the interim. In the event of noncompliance, the sites face fines of up to 500,000 euros.
Germany On October 11, 2025, TorrentFreak reported that major ISPs in Germany had blocked access to the main domains of Anna's Archive. The blockade was initiated by the (CUII), a coalition of rightsholders and ISPs that coordinates voluntary site blocking measures.
Italy In January 2024, Italy's national communications agency ordered major internet service providers (ISPs) in the country to block Anna's Archive due to a copyright complaint by the Italian Publishers Association. An investigation by the Digital Services Directorate confirmed the presence of copyrighted works on the site and found that some of its servers were likely owned by a Ukrainian hosting provider, but failed to uncover the identity of its operators.
Netherlands In March 2024, the Rotterdam District Court ordered major ISPs in the Netherlands to block Anna's Archive and LibGen due to a request by advocacy group BREIN. The order was "dynamic", meaning that if the blocked sites changed domains or IP addresses in the future, ISPs would be obligated to update their blocks.
United Kingdom In December 2024, the UK Publishers Association won an order from the High Court of Justice requiring major ISPs to block Anna's Archive and other copyright-infringing sites, extending a list of sites blocked since 2015 under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. The Association said it identified over one million records of copyrighted books and journal articles on Anna's Archive domains.
United States Since 2023, Anna's Archive domains have appeared in the annual Notorious Markets List of the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which highlights digital and physical markets allegedly involved in large-scale intellectual property infringement. These reports describe the site as related to Sci-Hub and LibGen. In response to a request for comment by the Office on its 2023 List, the Association of American Publishers identified Anna's Archive as an infringing site, and analyzed its cryptocurrency wallets to find that it had received over $29,000 in funds as of July 2023.
OCLC lawsuit