One of the most famous (or infamous, if you prefer) private torrent trackers is MyAnonaMouse.  It’s been around since circa 2008 and exclusively hosts ebooks, comics, and other electronic publications.

For the past 15-odd years it’s been a rather exclusive club.  You can apply, and if you’re impatient, you can buy access from one of the many black market brokers.  Once you’ve achieved membership, there are rules to follow, etiquette to obey, and work to maintain your membership.

But of late, people I’ve talked with say it’s not worth the hassle.

Why?

Anna’s Archive.

The Shadow Library Hydra

If you’ve been around the internet long enough to remember MP3 blogs and warez forums, you already know the pattern: anything that gets big enough to matter gets targeted, and then pops back up in some new form. The “shadow library” world has followed that script almost perfectly.

First there was LibGen, which in a sense began before the Internet itself was mainstream.  It originated as a distributor of samizdat, the underground information sharing in the Soviet Union.  Then later it migrated to various networks, including eventually the Internet.  LibGen was a “links aggregator” which allowed you to search for ebooks that were primarily from publicly available sources, as well as files contributed by users.

There’s an astonishing amount of material that genuinely is available for free, or at least can be downloaded by searching for a PDF by topic or name, and LibGen (aka Library Genesis) sought to bring all of that under one interface.

Z-Library was a fork of LibGen, and it started at about the same time as MyAnonaMouse.

The problem with both Z-Library and LibGen from a user point of view is that constant legal challenges these sites faced.  And it’s easy to see why: they engaged in outright copyright infringement.  Domains came and went, and the proprietors were forced to hide behind a cloak of secret identities.

By the 2020s, these sites were hosting tens of millions of books and articles, with a heavy emphasis on textbook and journal articles.

Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi): The Archivists Show Up

Before Z-Library’s 2022 bust, some anonymous archivists were already worried about how fragile these libraries were. Their answer was the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi).  This project was announced in July 2022 with a blunt mission: mirror the big shadow libraries so a takedown can’t erase them.

PiLiMi specifically set out to copy content that wasn’t safely duplicated elsewhere. By September 2022, the group says it had completed a full mirror of Z-Library’s collection (especially the portion not already in LibGen).

And Now Anna’s Archive

Then Z-Library got whacked in November 2022. The PiLiMi team already had the data, but normal users needed a way to find anything.

So days after the Z-Library seizure, a PiLiMi member using the pseudonym “Anna Archivist” launched Anna’s Archive in November 2022.

Anna’s Archive is best understood as a meta-search engine and catalog that points into multiple shadow libraries:

• It indexes PiLiMi’s Z-Library mirror.
• It also aggregates records from places like LibGen and Sci-Hub.
• And a ton of other material.

The key distinction: Anna’s Archive doesn’t “host” books directly. It’s closer to a universal search layer over existing mirrors and sources. That architecture is deliberate – it reduces single-point-of-failure risk and complicates straightforward domain takedowns.

By 2023-2025, Anna’s Archive became the default gateway for a lot of users who previously went straight to Z-Library, largely because it stayed reachable even when individual sources got smacked.

Anna’s is Huge…and Universally Accessible

Anna’s Archive has some interesting properties:

• It’s huge.  As of this writing: 61,344,044 books and 95,527,824 papers.
• Everything is DRM-free.
• It’s searchable, and the search is fast.
• There’s no gatekeeping.
• It’s free as in beer.  You can go and download anything you want.
• You can access everything with any web browser.
• Usage is completely anonymous.

You can also pay for faster downloads, which can also be done anonymously.

So Who Needs MyAnonaMouse and Its Ilk?

Contrast this with MAM, or really any torrent tracker:

• It’s gatekept to the hilt.  Even if you gain access, there’s no certainty you’ll keep it.
• It requires special software (bittorrent) to access.
• It requires significant effort to maintain membership, because you have to tend your ratios.
• You’ll need either a VPN or (more realistically) a seedbox, which you then have to register.
• It’s not very anonymous, because there are so many points of contact: your seedbox IP and its registration info, your registered email, etc.  It’s not impossible to be anonymous but it sure takes a lot more work.
• The content count is in the five-digit range, not the nine-digit range.
• Nearly all MAM content is available on Anna’s Archive.
• MAM has several red lines for content, including the writings of JRR Tolkein, the Harry Potter books,  pornography, and others.  These things will never be available on MAM.

So why go through the work of maintaining a MAM account?

If you’re searching for a pirated ebook, there is some advantage in having multiple venues because something might appear on one earlier than another.  However, everything you’ll find on MAM is on Anna’s or eventually will be, so you’re paying a high price for possible early access, which in many cases doesn’t happen anyway.  Things appear solely on Anna’s or first on Anna’s nearly all the time.

The MAM forum has some…um…fun word games you can play…so I guess that make it worthwhile?

MAM is Obsolete

“Friendliness, warmth, and sharing” is the MyAnonaMouse creed.  Its degree of friendliness and warmth is a personal experience I suppose, but its sharing seems like an old-fashioned way of going about things.

There are other types of media – movies, for example – which seem better suited for bittorrent technology, because the sizes can be so massive (10s or 100s of GBs for collections) that hosting them on one HTTP server doesn’t make sense.  But a couple megabytes for a book or journal is not an issue, and hence simple anonymous downloads via library projects seems to be winning out.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.