Anna's Archive offers $200k to exfiltrate every Google Books scan
A pirate library has put a price on the largest book-scanning project ever built: $200,000 for a full copy of Google Books' scans, paid to whoever delivers them.
Anna's Archive, the shadow library, has posted a $200,000 bounty for a complete copy of Google Books' scans, or a comparable trove, to fold into its permanent open collection.
It sits among smaller asks: $20k for a text version of AA's own library, $5k per million Internet Archive lending PDFs, $3k for Library of Congress MARC data.
The thread argued less about the scans than about who funds six-figure payouts, whether this turns criminal, and a warning that the bounty page links to a shady .li domain.
A price on Google's book vault
Anna's Archive, the shadow library that fronts Z-Library, LibGen and Sci-Hub, has put a number on the largest book-scanning effort ever built. Its $200k bounty listing asks a volunteer to deliver a complete copy of Google Books' scans, or a comparable set, for its open collection. The page returned a server error during reporting, so the specifics below come from the listing and the thread, with nothing invented.
The scan bounty headlines a longer menu. One reader pasted the neighboring listings from the same volunteering page:
"Internet Archive Digital Lending — $5000 per 1 million pdf files … Text version of our full library — $20,000" — a commenter quoting the bounty page
Not everyone read it as archiving. "Just do it and be legends, Larry. ;)" wrote one reader, nudging Google co-founder Larry Page.
The fight isn't about the scans
Where does the money come from? That question drew the sharpest scrutiny:
"it's hard to believe that can fund all these bounties - some going into six figures … It seems like there are some deep pockets funding them." — a reader doing the math
A legal line got redrawn too.
"I think this would cross the line from civil copyright claims into criminal activity … if Google's cybersecurity were always one rogue employee away from a massive leak, then it wouldn't be Google." — a backend developer in Argentina
A practical warning cut through the ideology: the bounty's own instructions carry a booby-trapped link.
"[this] appears as a link to a .li address, and that goes bad places." — a reader who inspected the page
Against the lawyering, a reader in a country with thin English-language stock offered the counterweight:
"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" — a self-described lifelong learner abroad
The bounty quietly reframes the shadow library: not a reader's back door but a supplier of training-grade data. HN cheers distribution and jeers AI training on the same books, which is backwards for any copyright holder who fears the copy more than the crawler.
Get breakdowns like this every day
The top Hacker News stories, unpacked — by email, Telegram, or RSS.
A rare bacterium in Cheyenne's water halted Meta's data-center discharges
A city utility in Wyoming pulled the plug on Meta's cooling-water discharges after lab tests tied a rare, metal-resistant microbe in the reclaimed supply to the contractor building Meta's campus.