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

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.)

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…

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.

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

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

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.

Piracy / copyright predictions?

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

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.

It seems like bounties for new sources of training data would be useful to the big model builders. I follow a guy who hoards vast quantities of old analog media of all kinds, a lot of it local. Bounties could be a way for him to cash in. But I'm not sure if it's an appreciating asset or if they'll find it anyway and it'll lose its value.

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

...

So AA is a front for openai?

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

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