These are all the torrents currently managed and released by Anna’s Archive. For more information, see “Our projects” on the Datasets page. For Library Genesis and Sci-Hub torrents, the Libgen.li torrents page maintains an overview.
These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation.
Torrents with “aac” in the filename use the Anna’s Archive Containers format. Torrents that are crossed out have been superseded by newer torrents, for example because newer metadata has become available. Some torrents that have messages in their filename are “adopted torrents”, which is a perk of our top tier “Amazing Archivist” membership.
You can help out enormously by seeding torrents that are low on seeders. If everyone who reads this chips in, we can preserve these collections forever. This is the current breakdown:
| Status | Torrents | Size | Seeders |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🔴 | 54 | 154.0TB | <4 |
| 🟡 | 183 | 92.5TB | 4–10 |
| 🟢 | 111 | 17.2TB | >10 |
IMPORTANT: If you seed large amounts of our collection (50TB or more), please contact us at [email protected] so we can let you know when we deprecate any large torrents.
It’s unclear to me how these torrents are used. If individual books are not downloaded from them, is this only to make it possible to create similar sites in the future, in case this one is taken down?
This is basically a “distributed backup” of the entire database. The torrents are not actively serving files- they’re there to store multiple copies of the main database across the globe so that the entire database can be recovered (by anyone with the requisite knowledge, mind you) in the event that something happens to the original Anna’s Archive team or the main database is lost/seized by “law enforcement”.
It’s equivalent to how backup managers in ye olden days would make broken up piece files of a certain size that could fit onto a CD or DVD, so you could fit the entire contents of a large 20+GB hard drive onto multiple smaller media. The backup itself is not accessed unless your main hard drive crashes, in which case you reassemble all the individual pieces back into your complete OS environment after replacing the hard drive.