Anna's Archive offers $200K bounty for Google Books scan data
Original: Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
Why This Matters
The bounty highlights ongoing tensions between large-scale digital archives and public access to book preservation data.
Anna's Archive, a digital library project, has posted a $200,000 bounty on GitLab for anyone who can extract and deliver the full book scan collection from Google Books or similarly large archives held by AI companies, particularly those containing rare books.
Anna's Archive has publicly listed a $200,000 bounty on its GitLab issue tracker, targeting the full corpus of scanned books held by Google Books. The project notes that while Google Books contains vast numbers of scanned titles, access is restricted to small text snippets displayed around search results, with no bulk access available to the public.
The bounty post encourages potential contributors to contact the team early if they discover a scalable extraction method, stating the project may assist in scaling up a working prototype. In a pointed message directed at Google employees, the post acknowledges that '$200,000 means little to you,' but suggests that leaking the data would earn the person recognition as a 'legendary archivist.'
The bounty also extends to comparable collections assembled by AI companies, with particular interest in datasets that capture rare or hard-to-find books. Claimants are directed to review the project's official bounty guidelines before beginning any work. Anna's Archive is known for aggregating and preserving digital library data from multiple sources.