# Anna's Archive 134 Hacker News commenters recommended Anna's Archive and 57 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** A huge free, DRM-free archive of books and research papers that people praise for opening up and preserving knowledge, though critics dislike its paid memberships and messy duplicate listings. ## Why people recommend it - Vast free book collection (8 comments): "Anna's has several orders of magnitude more books, and includes research publications and more, ah, contemporary materials to boot." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48156123)) "Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507472)) "Anna's Archive estimates they have preserved 16% of the world's books, all available to download with an internet connection." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709440)) - Spreads knowledge to everyone (7 comments): "One side wants to freely share knowledge with all of humanity, the other wants to restrict it to make a buck. I know who I support." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421483)) "this organization has done the most to enable human collaboration and thus enable a precursor to peace and progress and prosperity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47792482)) "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" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48787460)) - Preserves otherwise lost material (5 comments): "Anna's Archive estimates they have preserved 16% of the world's books, all available to download with an internet connection." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709440)) "I think it's a bit amazing and a bit embarrassing that western culture is being kept out of a kind of dark ages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46662510)) "This IMO makes them more resilient against that sort of thing, and also means they can actually do their job." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388833)) - Try books before buying (4 comments): "I now use Anna's archive to download a book and decide if I will pay for it later after reading at least some of it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776590)) "So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47549249)) "I've decided that "Anna's" plus used physical books plus printed new books are the right combination." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817444)) ## What people warn about - Aggressive monetization of pirated material (8 comments): "Their style suggests they have other goals than freedom of information and reminds of the super rich wikimedia foundation always campaigning for more money." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48207191)) "They basically have just copied other shadow libraries archives and are much more aggressive about monetizing than the long-standing alternatives." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238697)) "They're not 'a' non-profit, and there's simply no way to know that they're not taking in loads of money and pocketing it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46498072)) - Duplicate and poor-quality copies (3 comments): "This has unfortunately led to search results for a particular book containing multiple versions of that book" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788624)) "Very often, I found that it looks excellent on IA, but terrible, borderline unreadable, in the AA copy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488335)) "It already has many copies of the same books and no way to tell which ones are erroneous or incomplete." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567307)) - Rehosts other libraries' collections (4 comments): "They basically have just copied other shadow libraries archives and are much more aggressive about monetizing than the long-standing alternatives." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238697)) "Ironic that AA seems to claim some sense of ownership over the data they scraped from other people and re-hosted" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235506)) "It lives but as a much shadier alter egos that does not support all that original libgen supported." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422936)) - Confusing interface (2 comments): "wouldn't kill them to add some fucking details to the main page rather than making you dig for it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065204)) "for various reasons I don't quite like Anna's Archive as much; the UI is imo also more confusing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776407)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Project Gutenberg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/project-gutenberg.md): 76 recommend - [Standard Ebooks](https://hackerapproved.com/p/standard-ebooks.md): 34 recommend - [Library Genesis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/library-genesis.md): 15 recommend - [LibGen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libgen.md): 12 recommend - [SourceLibrary](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sourcelibrary-org.md): 11 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Anna's Archive", https://hackerapproved.com/p/anna-s-archive/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).