Anna’s Archive has backed up the world’s largest comics shadow library | Hacker News Reader

Anna’s Archive has backed up the world’s largest comics shadow library

annas-blog.org

68 pointsBugaddr15 comments

> For every $2k that we raise, we’ll release another big torrent!

I’m worried that tying monetary benefits to the release of (others’) intellectual property won’t end up well for them.

Yeah, maybe not the best idea. And pointless, because we intend to release all torrents soon anyway (most are still processing)! Removed this part, thanks for the feedback.

So glad to see you here and thanks so much for anna’s archive, it has been super helpful to me personally for access to so many books mostly inaccessible to normal people in my country due to exhorbitant pricing structures.

Author here. Happy to answer questions. We're excited to finally be getting this collection out there!

You are doing some solid work regardless of " ethical" considerations that IP laws impose.

Please be safe and don't be greedy. Have seen many icons fall over the years.

Meritorious work, but one huge file makes it hugely impractical. Am I really supposed to find local space for 12TB of stuff if I'm just after a few series, i.e. probably a couple of GBs at best? Or is there some torrent hackery that allows me to peek inside the file and only get the chunks I want?

The torrents are only for hard-core data hoarders. If you want just a few individual files, you can use Anna's Archive.

> That’s better for your hard drive and torrent software than a gazillion smaller files.

Oh, that's for sure. Is there an easy way to mount .tar on Windows?

I have some library data which would benefit from serving as a single/a couple of large files, but most of the folks would be on Windows. VHDX is out of question (would be modified as soon as mounted)... maybe .iso ?

For the use case of "mountable archive on windows" there's .wim files, but that use case is pretty small and there is no reason to pick it over .iso here.

Not sure about Windows. On Linux we use https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount

20000$ for making torrents from comics taken from LibGen? Are you serious?

Damn, you even worse than Z-Library. At least they did a real job and haven’t run away after taking money, like you after receiving donations and shutting down IPFS seeding because of your technical incapability to maintain IPFS hosting.

It's a shame that there doesn't exist a tool where you can say "I want to seed X gigabytes of this dataset" and it automatically selects and seeds the X rarest GB". It would be fantastic for distributing storage for archivists, while the data set could still be edited and added to and downloaded and automatically balanced across the seeders.

Does such a thing exist? Why isn't it more widely used, and everyone still relies on immutable torrents?

That is a really nice idea for datahoarders like me.

A protocol to announce a change on the collection by one of their members and being announced by the whole system.

Curious why you don't consider refactoring the file layout before making the torrent.

Good question! We did consider that, but the structure of the directories themselves conveyed a ton of information, so ultimately we thought that it was better to keep it like this.

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