One problem I see with annas archive is that there is a tendency towards older books. Now I do understand this for many reasons, but ... I recently read a book about steel construction in 1932, just for curiousity. I wanted to find a more recent one - did not even have to be, say, 1990 or 2000 or some such, but I simply could not find any (well, perhaps english speaking, but this is also a problem in that non-english languages are VERY underpresented in general).
I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.
flexagoon•Mar 27, 2026
> I hope they can fix this in the long run.
There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen.
You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to
layer8•Mar 27, 2026
In my experience, the availability of anything that isn’t popular or computer nerd-adjacent from before the age of ebooks is very hit and miss on AA.
Crazy how much more IPv6 space RIPE NCC allocated than ARIN. Really shows off their countries' different stances on innovation.
p-e-w•Mar 28, 2026
I think it’s even crazier that a visible slice of the address space that is supposed to last for the rest of humanity’s future has already been allocated.
gzread•Mar 28, 2026
It's 1/8 of that space and it's being allocated in big blocks that are expected not to run out unless humanity expands to the whole solar system. If it does run out, there are 7 tries left. More if you only use half as much space next time.
implode7569•Mar 27, 2026
Feels like a market map for books. Very cool.
comrade1234•Mar 27, 2026
I got burned buying a trilogy with a good rating on goodreads. I only read the first 1.5 books and didn't bother after that.
It sucked and when I looked again later it had a more relevant rating. I think the initial score was gamed by bots.
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, which I've done most recently for Children of Time.
Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.
AreShoesFeet000•Mar 28, 2026
Imagine being sanctioned for trying to read books.
james-bcn•Mar 28, 2026
Children of Time is wonderful! I wish Adrian Tchaikovsky would stop churning them out so quickly and write some more of the quality of Children of Time.
kace91•Mar 27, 2026
It's very strange to me how small Spanish is there.
Second language in the world by native speakers, piracy being effectively legal in Spain (non commercially), and so on.
ghighi7878•Mar 28, 2026
Spanish is second largest by people but not by revenue
sfRattan•Mar 28, 2026
Piracy of anything other than live streams of La Liga games... For those, Spain shuts down whole IP ranges and cripples the Internet at large while the game is live.
gonzalohm•Mar 28, 2026
It's because some books are not categorized as Spanish. They are just under a publisher name. For example, search for "Don Quijote"
nomdep•Mar 28, 2026
Very weird.
Only in Spain there are 3k publishers.
Argentina has 1k publishers.
And then we have huge amount of books published in spanish by Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Springer, etc.
FrustratedMonky•Mar 28, 2026
This is really nice.
When zoomed all the way, it is a book shelf. Totally un-expected, nice touch.
rosstex•Mar 28, 2026
This makes it feel like there aren't many books in the world
C-x_C-f•Mar 28, 2026
That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression.
In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew.
To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).
squigz•Mar 28, 2026
There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.
fakefish•Mar 28, 2026
The bookshelf is nice, but I'd love to be able to read the titles more easily - maybe rotate by 90 degrees?
I remember the story of it being made, and I seem to even remember there was some very generous bounty attached, but I never got the point of it. I mean, honestly, ISBN is a pretty problematic thing on its own, especially today, when self-publishing is common, and especially for a web-library that is collecting scans of everything somewhat notable that ever was out there. But even accepting it as a main entity, because that's what we've got right now, what does this visualization achieve? What does it show? You cannot really find a book using it, I mean, any more specifically than "some random book probably in a given language". I was kinda surprised when this visualization was declared a winner of that particular bounty/contest.
functional_dev•Mar 28, 2026
exactly, that map looks like a mess of random blocks...
big blocks are registration groups (countries) and squares inside are registrants (publishers). like a hierarchy.
this visualisation helped me to put pieces together - https://vectree.io/c/isbn
max8539•Mar 28, 2026
A lot of errors like "resolvePublishers(978-0): SyntaxError: The string did not match the expected pattern." are blocking view on mobile…
15 Comments
I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.
There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen.
You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to
With a few other options in search:
https://openlibrary.org/search?q=%22steel+construction%22&mo...
[0]: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
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, which I've done most recently for Children of Time.
Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.
Second language in the world by native speakers, piracy being effectively legal in Spain (non commercially), and so on.
Only in Spain there are 3k publishers. Argentina has 1k publishers.
And then we have huge amount of books published in spanish by Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Springer, etc.
When zoomed all the way, it is a book shelf. Totally un-expected, nice touch.
In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew.
To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).
Happy to answer questions as always :)
big blocks are registration groups (countries) and squares inside are registrants (publishers). like a hierarchy. this visualisation helped me to put pieces together - https://vectree.io/c/isbn