My biggest complaint with library management tools, and I think this applies to Librari as well, is the lack of multi-user support. I have a lot of books in my "home library", spread out over a few rooms. But I'm not the only person interacting with this library. Their are books on the shelves that "belong" to other people in the house, and we all joint manage the books. Sharing logins can work, but misses out on so many things that we would like to have.
My dream tool for this would allow multiple people to be "members" of a library, and be able to belong to multiple members themselves. They could collectively manage things like metadata, like what books are on the shelves, but could have individual things like ratings or tracking what they've read.
Plex is actually a really good example of this. I hope some day to find a tracker like that for my books.
The paid version of libib.com allows you to do this. Each manager can be assigned overlapping collections to edit, but also have the ability to track status, rate and review individually.
Thank you for your comment and for explaining your problem in such detail. Currently, you can mark your library as public and share the link with others, but they can only see the books in it. What you're saying actually makes total sense, and I will add this feature to my backlog.
This sounds like a great idea for a feature for the OP. Cool feature to kickstart the database. Take a photo. Something something AI. 150 rows filled in
I use https://libib.com for this use case. I didn't see it mentioned here, so figured I'd share.
I'll also mention a fun coding project that I used ChatGPT on. I created a data enriched spreadsheet out of my physical books. This could then be used to bulk import into libib for a searchable and visual digital bookshelf.
First I took photos of my bookshelves such that the spines were visible. Then I had ChatGPT vision model transcribe visible titles and authors, and guess the books based on that. Then I turned that into a CSV. Finally I had ChatGPT generate a Python script that used the Google Books API to enrich the spreadsheet with ISBNs. Finally I bulk uploaded that CSV with ISBNs to libib, and voila, I had a digitized library.
Thank you for your comment.
Libib is indeed a well-established player in this industry. Although it suggests a lot of different functionalities/features, it lacks detailed statistics/analytics regarding users' reading activity, libraries and content. It also doesn't allow you to create your own data fields for storing information about books, authors or publishers.
Regarding data extraction from photos, I considered this method initially, but then decided to leave it until there is specific feedback regarding this. Apparently, people would actually use it, as another user also pointed this out in a comment.
The problem with library apps isn't really the app. It's trivially easy to spin up a database with all the necessary fields. The real problem with library apps (or systems) is having to actually manage/index/code/scan the books, which is a pain.
Most books are in x39.50 catalogs, I have koha at home, using the British Library, Library of Congress, National Libraries of Scotland and France, and Oxford, it finds 90% of my books, barcode scan a shelf, import, add missing books
I got a barcode scanner and wrote a script to look them up in Open Library. Most of my books are found, but I don't have much weird/old stuff without barcodes. I found the process of scanning quite enjoyable tbh.
I have more than 500 books too. I have tried using multiple platforms and I end up leaving them because they become a social platform or more than a simple book management. I don't have issues with that, but it's about how much time I want to spend on interacting with people.
For e.g. my wife used to be very active in Librarything and Goodreads, but during covid and post covid, she has completely stopped using these platforms.
So depending upon peoples needs the platform can become useful or time leeches. And it will depend upon what they need from it at that given moment.
Now, I have an excel sheet with all the books I have, and I don't see any way to import that list into the platform. I don't see myself sitting and rescanning or manually entering that list. For maintaining the library, i.e. whenever we buy books at that moment scanning or manual entry makes sense. But during onboarding I need an excel or csv import provision.
- Auto categorization. I don't want to sit manually and tag it or set the genre
- Multiple people be able to add and update a collection (Family mode)
- Borrow/Loaned status
- Books read but not owned
- Sharing the collection with closed group (friends and family)
- Sharing the collection with a larger community (if someone in the family is interested, but only in their profile and not all family members)
- Book recommendations (things that fall in my interest are fine, but also that surprise me). I miss the days when the book store owner used to remember us and used to recommend something which otherwise I wouldn't have picked up.
- And obviously able to export my data. I have been burned by enough platforms in the past 15 years that, this is necessary!
I have been using zotero for this purpose. And I know it is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.
But it is pretty good at grabbing the book detail, and I have a bunch of custom fields and comments, and I can add other stuff into the book definition like text files and PDFs and jpgs and URLs.
You can also wholesale share libraries and create group libraries etc. But it is not very good at tracking read and unread status, let alone borrowed and returned. And it definitely doesn't give recommendations.
One of my main difficulties in moving from this to other media libraries is they are all each so focused on one kind of media. I find a lot of the things I want to keep track of, and share, and remember, are mixed media, authors who also paint, or website only books, multi media comics, films, art and literary theory. Not just the things that happen to sit on a shelf that I own. Which database does that music producer / graphic artist / film maker / author sit in my collection?
Thank you very much for this detailed comment — it is indeed very useful to me. The import feature is certainly on my radar and is something that I'll start developing very soon. You're absolutely right that it would make onboarding a large collection really easy.
I'll take note of the other features you mentioned too. Thank you again!
And I understand some features are already built by you, but as I was not able to play with the app (since I can't import any books), I have listed the ones that are important for me
1. I can’t find a way to add the date or month when I finished the book. I mean, I tried adding books I read this year, but all the books are recorded as “read” in the current month.
2. I can’t find a place to add the start date and end date for reading a book, but I do see an “average time to complete” data. Do we need to add “custom fields” to make this work?
Good:
1. I’ve been manually trying to do this over a spreadsheet and run a data analysis at the end of the year. Thanks for making this. My manual work https://www.prasannakumarr.in/books-read-2018
2. Multi-currency support is great
3. Adding custom fields is also great.
Great work overall!
My only qualm is that I’ve tried many of these apps that got introduced on HN. But most of them end up getting shut down and become graveyard projects. I want to make sure the developer is serious about its future, especially at the time of vibe coding adventures. I want this to be like a https://www.monicahq.com/, small but still profitable.
Thank you for your comment and for raising the issues.
When you set the book status to 'Read', an edit pen appears to the right of it (in the same area where you set the status), which you can click to edit the start and finish dates. Please note that when you set the status to 'Read', it's assumed that you've read the whole book, and this is added to the 'Pages read this month' statistic. Conversely, when you set the status to 'DNF' (Did Not Finish), you can set start and end dates again using the edit pen, as well as providing a progress update, i.e. how many pages you read before stopping.
I've been dedicating my time after work to this project for several months already, and I plan to continue doing so for a long time. I'm going to use it a lot personally too, so that's a big part of my motivation, to be honest.
Im working on a similar project, Colibri (https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri), an app to manage your ebook collection. Librari is looking really slick! Also, It’s always interesting to see how others approach schema selection and customization.
If I may, I would suggest adding support for ingesting data from open sources, for example OpenLibrary, WikiData, the LoC API, and a bunch of others. Since you’re building a for-profit project, you can probably also tap the billed services to get high-quality metadata. But even with OpenLibrary alone, you have access to a treasure trove of information that spares users from having to type off things from their books. That allows for bulk import, high-res covers, and so on.
I’m currently working on the metadata reconciliation engine in Colibri, so feel free to check out the source every once in a while.
Thank you for the comment. librari.io already uses OpenLibrary for metadata enrichment, but I'll definitely check out the others too.
I'll definitely check out Colibri — thank you for sharing!
Have been using Obsidian for this which I can also highly recommend. Each book is a note with frontmatter properties that matter to me. The book search plugin[1] also makes it easy to add new books with a cover image included. Using Obsidian for other kind of collections as well[2].
This looks like it's a website without an app, so a few questions for you:
1. How does the site perform on mobile? If it doesn't that's a non starter for a large audience segment.
2. What's the pricing? There are several free options out there for managing your book collection, so unless there's a fremium tier (which there's no concrete language about pricing on the pricing page around subscription cost or subscription tiers) less people will want to try this out.
3. Why should someone use a web based library management tool over one that's hosted locally (either as a phone app, or as a site local to your network)?
4. What problems does this solve that others have missed? I would love for that to be front and center on the landing page.
Thank you for your questions. The actual app can be used/seen only after signing in. Regarding your questions:
1. This was initially planned as a web-based application, and it still is. However, when it comes to mobile responsiveness, it's not great — something I've pointed out and am currently working on. I'll finish this work during the weekend. Creating native apps will probably make sense in future, too.
2. Yeah, as it's only the beta version at the moment, the pricing doesn't mention anything specific. I believe there will be three different pricing tiers. There will definitely be a freemium version with some limitations, e.g. a limit of one library and 100–200 books in library, and access to basic statistics only. I need to think more about the pricing in more detail, as I've only concentrated on building the product so far. However, in general, I imagine it to be as I've already described above.
3. This is a very good question, to be honest, and one that I haven't thought much about either. I would probably use a locally hosted application if it offered all the features that librari.io offers. However, I can think of some reasons why a user might want to use a web-based solution. Firstly, I assume that syncing across devices would be difficult when the application is hosted on only one device, unless it offers export/import functionality. Backup and reliability are other reasons why a user would opt for a web-based solution. I believe that the ability to share your library with other people or family members using a link, which gives them access from anywhere at any time, is a good reason to opt for a web-based solution.
4. I can outline the three most significant issues I encountered, which eventually led to the development of this app. The first is the outdated UI that most of them suggest (but of course, I'm not saying that librari.io's UI is the best). The second is the lack of library statistics and analytics (e.g. distribution tables of books, authors, etc. or content-wise and reading activity related statistics). The third is the lack of customisation. For example, the ability to add custom book, author and publisher data fields with different types, such as text, date and number, and then attach actual information to those fields when editing those entities.
I'm in an adjacent area, cataloging my huge collection of periodicals for my vintage ad collection (adretro.com). The biggest thing that helped me that I didn't see you mention but maybe I missed it: taking book cover photos to populate the inventory. OpenAI vision can easily extract the book, author and meta data. This speeds up the data entry considerably. I scan a whole box of periodicals and upload a zip of all the images. My software extracts the info. So for yours, if I just take photos of all the books on a shelf, it could handle the rest.
Thank you for your comment.
Currently, there are three methods of adding a book: searching (which uses the Google Books API under the hood), manual addition (which nobody wants to do — I completely understand — but is the only option for old books that cannot be found online; I have a lot of these) and scanning the ISBN (which also uses the Google Books API).
I initially thought about adding the method you suggested, where you provide a picture and then extract the information, but I decided it was not the right time to implement that. So, I left it for later, when there is any need or feedback regarding it from users. From your comment, I understand that it's something that users might actually consider using.
Yeah if there is an ISBN listed, that will be fastest. But for older books that don't have an ISBN, if there is a title on the cover or spine, OpenAI is really good at extracting that, regardless of the font or image quality. It's like a super OCR. From the title and author you can probably stub in the rest of the data, and the user can correct it if necessary.
This is awesome. Exactly the sort of thing I like to see on HN: someone going deep on a niche they really care about. The app is more polished than I expected.
The design is nice and clean. I really appreciate dark mode as well, though some of the text on this page, for example
https://app.librari.io/subscription
looks like it needs to be tweaked for dark mode.
I would genuinely use this, as I don't always like the public aspect of Goodreads, but it would depend on your pricing structure and privacy policy.
Thank you for your comment. The text on the dark mode page at https://app.librari.io/subscription should now be fixed. Thank you for pointing that out.
I plan to suggest a freemium tier and two affordable paid plans. However, as it's still in beta, it's a bit soon to provide any specifics, to be honest — I still need to figure those out, too!
Regarding the bulk import, yes, that's in my backlog and will start working on that soon.
I just want a simple/quick/easy way to scan all of the books in my house and print spine labels like the ones they use in a library.
Dewey decimal or Library of Congress or whatever. We just have too many books (mainly children's books) and I want an easy low-thought/low-friction way to identify exactly where each book should be put away.
Would this help with my problem? Is there already a solution for this?
> Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.
That what I concluded after a cursory search of this space as well.
Library of congress system is way too much for a home library, you occupy the categories so sparsely that it feels basically arbitrary. It is arguably like this even for small municipal and branch libraries.
Dewey is better but most people's personal libraries will be really heavy on a couple of the classes, light on another couple, the rest close to non-existent. So you still end up having to have a system to organize the class you have the most of, the dewey subclasses are still too fine-grained for a home library, and you have the LoC system problem again.
My spouse is a former librarian and we have a few thousand books between us, across a few rooms. What we do is each bookcase roughly corresponds to a dewey class or two, we try to avoid any one shelf having more than one subject. After that it's just by spine color. You'd be surprised how well this works! It's easy enough for kids to find and place books by color, and the visual sense memory works great for finding stuff. Every once in a while it'll throw you, "I swear this book was green" but whatever it mostly works.
Another thing that we don't do but could be fun is just to buy a set of the genre stickers that some libraries put on the spine.
There's actually. Currently there are three methods of adding a book:
- searching (which uses the Google Books API under the hood)
- manual addition (which nobody wants to do — I completely understand — but is the only option for old books that cannot be found online; I have a lot of these)
- scanning the ISBN (which also uses the Google Books API).
Care to share any thoughts about what tech stack you've used to put this together? Which libraries/frameworks you used, whether you would again if you were starting again today. I don't have a need for this app personally, but I love hearing the (candid) experience reports when people build nice things like this.
Yes, I can certainly be open and provide a lot of detail. The landing page is a standard Next.js application hosted on Vercel. The web app itself is a React app that uses Shadcn, Tailwind CSS and TanStack/React-Query, and the backend is a Node.js application. I use PostgreSQL and Redis instances to store data in the long and short term, respectively.
For deployment, I use Dokploy, which is an excellent way of deploying stuff in containers and making them communicate with each other (and actually this is my first time that I use it). You can self-host it on a VPS, which is what I do. Finally, I use AWS S3 for object storage and backups.
I would definitely use this tech stack again if I were to start again. The only thing that may change in the future, when there's a lot of traffic, is how the app is served and hosted overall. Currently, it's on a VPS, but depending on the traffic volume, it would make sense to switch to AWS infra (e.g. using lambdas etc) at some point in the future.
Question for parents of young kids. When do you find time to read? After having kids, reading, playing video games or doing any hobby that requires more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted attention seems infeasible.
I really like the word "home library". What if we called it digital home library and it can contain all your photos, documents, webpage saves and passwords too?!
the "aha" moment for me would be if I could click a picture of my bookshelf and have the catalogue be ready.
I'd highly recommend a checkout flow where a user clicks a picture of their bookshelf, and the app automatically extracts the titles, versions, publications etc. I'd be interesting to know how people use your product depending on the "size" of their libraries... cheers and good luck!
Thank you for your comment. Yes, the ability to extract from a picture is something that many people would also like to see, as well as you. I'll definitely think about this and add it to my backlog.
looking forward to the feature! I tried the product but as of now it's too much work for me to migrate and enter each book one-by-one, especially since I don't have a digital file containing the log.
I also use the My Library Android application. I have about 1,200 books scanned through the ISBN tool in that app, which took a few hours across a few weekends. Common issues were old books not being found, or information formatting issues. Overall though - all I cared about was a comprehensive view to track across when we move homes in case any boxes get lost. That app has very limited statistics, but I haven't found myself interested in exploring anything further, nor care about tracking my own reading progress, tbh. Like others mentioned - the scanning is slow and error prone and frustrating. A bulk import from a photograph of a book shelf sounds fantastic, but with re-releases of books, I'd be curious about it's accuracy (reviewing and editing incorrect information is the worst after you scanned the ISBN, so a nice UI like in this app that could make the correction process easier would be great!). The single photo with multiple books and bulk import I would have paid for, definitely. UI of the MyLibrary app is not great, but it is free, and I can export the data, so happy with it. Someone else mentioned multi-user support, which would be nice, but not confident I could convince my family to scan books either. Once you get everything in, scanning additional books as they come is easy.
All I want is an offline iPhone app that can let me know if I have already purchased a book. Because with a collection as large as mine, it’s a legitimate problem.
I am using BookCrawler, but I exceeded some internal threshold back in 2017 or thereabouts (at about 3,000 entries), and several features - search, stats, etc. - took a permanent dirt nap and refused to function.
And there was a problem with the iPhone 15 camera which prevented correct UPC scanning, for which the author never provided an update or even a response.
Finally, there was this incident earlier this year when the app ceased to be on the App Store, the website itself temporarily vanished, and resetting the app caused you to lose any purchase status. And this, despite reaching out multiple times over the years in an attempt to contribute or take over.
And honestly, aside from being sorted by title, sorted by author, and within an author sorted by series first and then title (if not in a series), I don’t need much more than that. Okay, basic book stats as well, including Dewey decimal entry, so I don’t have to figure that out myself.
Indeed, librari.io is designed for managing physical books. Moreover, if calibre was intended for managing not only ebooks, I would personally prefer to use google sheets because calibre's outdated UI is sufficient reason for me not to use it, although it may still be functional.
This looks great! My favorite projects posted on HN are the ones that come out of folks scratching their own personal itches.
Like you, I have a bunch of books on various bookshelves in the house. I also have a number of collapsing cardboard boxes in my basement filled with books from my parents'/grandparents' houses. At some point, I really need to sort through all of these and figure out a) what even is there b) what do I keep to put on shelves and c) is there anything worth selling to a shop or giving to the library vs tossing? Complicating this is that many of these books are ancient, and even newer ones aren't necessarily in pristine condition.
I have an old CueCat lying around I was going to use to scan barcodes on books new enough to have them... that'll be tedious enough, but going through the rest manually is going to be a giant project (which is part of why they're still there in my basement).
I don't see it on the site from a cursory review (apologies if I missed it): do you support importing from ISBNs (such as scanned by a CueCat)? I'd also be quite interested in the machine vision aspect others have mentioned here (though since they aren't on a bookshelf, it would likely be individual photos of each book as they are pulled out of the box)...
Tying into that, I'm curious what the workflow for inputting books will be like, both for my boxes-o-books case, and for the general bookcase import case. I could 100% see myself using this if it was a nice straightforward brainless process I could bang out in an afternoon while watching a show, but if it's more of a manually-search-and-input process, I'm definitely going to lose patience before I finish them all :)
Tacking onto what others have said about automated labeling, that would be extremely useful too---especially for the books in poor condition, but even for the nicer ones, just so that I could get a handle on them all. I have a Bluetooth label printer that could be fantastic here...
Thank you for your comment. Yes, it is possible to import via ISBN scan. Currently, there are three ways to add a book:
- searching (which uses the Google Books API under the hood)
- manual addition (which nobody wants to do — I completely understand — but is the only option for old books that cannot be found online; I have a lot of these)
- scanning the ISBN (which also uses the Google Books API).
I'll certainly consider the labelling feature and add it to the backlog.
We where on the same boat as you at the start. We tried multiple iterations of different process, but in the end what worked for us was following:
1. Use a bar code scanner to scan a batch of books into a text file.
2. Wrote a small script to use Amazon API (this was when Amazon had a public API available) and Goodreads (this was before Amazon acquisition)(do you see the pattern :-) to search for the books. I heuristically merged the book data. We manually verified it and then pushed it to a sqlite db.
3. We spent weeks doing this, where everyday either of us spent at least 1 hour doing the scanning, verifying and importing it.
By couple of months we where done.
4. After that I exported it to excel so that we had multiple copies (Google drive and Dropbox)
Post that we tried various tools, like calibre, a custom application I wrote, etc ... But maintaining that catalogue or software was painful.
Challenges, we faced:
- Some ISBN's where not available.
- Mix of ISBN13 and ISBN10, but that was fixed in the script
- Older books do not have barcodes or worse have barcodes but are not ISBN at all (ISBN was introduced sometime in 1970). For these I used to enter the title and author and then used the search API to fill in the rest of the data.
- Some books stayed in the boxes. But they where scanned and put back so location was at least known!
It has a built-in bar code scanner using your phone's camera which we like. But many a times it pulls in a wrong book. It's easy enough to correct it though as the search functionality works really well.
Overall what really worked for us
- Putting aside some time every day to scan the books. Every day half an hour to an hour was doable and did not feel overwhelming. Otherwise the project looked very daunting. And over a period of time we made substantial progress.
- Now whenever we get books, first thing we do is to scan it. My partner is anal about it (thankfully)
What does not work for us still:
- Re-arranging books screws up the database. Now the locations are all wrong :-(
- When we where giving away the books, we had to export the data into excel and then share it via google drive for people to block it for themselves. We packed them but they never turned up for picking it up. These are still in boxes. We need to figure out a way for us release it and notify everyone that these books are back to being available.
Hopefully this inspires you to get those books out of the boxes at least once :-)
My biggest complaint with library management tools, and I think this applies to Librari as well, is the lack of multi-user support. I have a lot of books in my "home library", spread out over a few rooms. But I'm not the only person interacting with this library. Their are books on the shelves that "belong" to other people in the house, and we all joint manage the books. Sharing logins can work, but misses out on so many things that we would like to have.
My dream tool for this would allow multiple people to be "members" of a library, and be able to belong to multiple members themselves. They could collectively manage things like metadata, like what books are on the shelves, but could have individual things like ratings or tracking what they've read.
Plex is actually a really good example of this. I hope some day to find a tracker like that for my books.
The paid version of libib.com allows you to do this. Each manager can be assigned overlapping collections to edit, but also have the ability to track status, rate and review individually.
Thank you for your comment and for explaining your problem in such detail. Currently, you can mark your library as public and share the link with others, but they can only see the books in it. What you're saying actually makes total sense, and I will add this feature to my backlog.
Hack I learned recently: take pictures of all your bookshelves. Then you can search the text on the spines (author, title) in your photo app.
This sounds like a great idea for a feature for the OP. Cool feature to kickstart the database. Take a photo. Something something AI. 150 rows filled in
Someone told me this last summer and life changed.
I use https://libib.com for this use case. I didn't see it mentioned here, so figured I'd share.
I'll also mention a fun coding project that I used ChatGPT on. I created a data enriched spreadsheet out of my physical books. This could then be used to bulk import into libib for a searchable and visual digital bookshelf.
First I took photos of my bookshelves such that the spines were visible. Then I had ChatGPT vision model transcribe visible titles and authors, and guess the books based on that. Then I turned that into a CSV. Finally I had ChatGPT generate a Python script that used the Google Books API to enrich the spreadsheet with ISBNs. Finally I bulk uploaded that CSV with ISBNs to libib, and voila, I had a digitized library.
Just in case this gives you any ideas!
Thank you for your comment. Libib is indeed a well-established player in this industry. Although it suggests a lot of different functionalities/features, it lacks detailed statistics/analytics regarding users' reading activity, libraries and content. It also doesn't allow you to create your own data fields for storing information about books, authors or publishers. Regarding data extraction from photos, I considered this method initially, but then decided to leave it until there is specific feedback regarding this. Apparently, people would actually use it, as another user also pointed this out in a comment.
Glad the comment was helpful. Cool project. From one book lover to another, best of luck!
The problem with library apps isn't really the app. It's trivially easy to spin up a database with all the necessary fields. The real problem with library apps (or systems) is having to actually manage/index/code/scan the books, which is a pain.
Yeah exactly, what would be awesome is an app that lets you take a picture of your book shelf and captures every book title (and author if possible)
And then after that step it could maybe build a small library with a nice, compact ui automatically
Most books are in x39.50 catalogs, I have koha at home, using the British Library, Library of Congress, National Libraries of Scotland and France, and Oxford, it finds 90% of my books, barcode scan a shelf, import, add missing books
I got a barcode scanner and wrote a script to look them up in Open Library. Most of my books are found, but I don't have much weird/old stuff without barcodes. I found the process of scanning quite enjoyable tbh.
I have more than 500 books too. I have tried using multiple platforms and I end up leaving them because they become a social platform or more than a simple book management. I don't have issues with that, but it's about how much time I want to spend on interacting with people. For e.g. my wife used to be very active in Librarything and Goodreads, but during covid and post covid, she has completely stopped using these platforms. So depending upon peoples needs the platform can become useful or time leeches. And it will depend upon what they need from it at that given moment.
Now, I have an excel sheet with all the books I have, and I don't see any way to import that list into the platform. I don't see myself sitting and rescanning or manually entering that list. For maintaining the library, i.e. whenever we buy books at that moment scanning or manual entry makes sense. But during onboarding I need an excel or csv import provision.
Currently we are using [My Library](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vgm.mylibr...), an android app. I am ready to move out of it as then the whole family can operate it.
Features I will like:
- Easy on boarding of a large collection
- Auto categorization. I don't want to sit manually and tag it or set the genre
- Multiple people be able to add and update a collection (Family mode)
- Borrow/Loaned status
- Books read but not owned
- Sharing the collection with closed group (friends and family)
- Sharing the collection with a larger community (if someone in the family is interested, but only in their profile and not all family members)
- Book recommendations (things that fall in my interest are fine, but also that surprise me). I miss the days when the book store owner used to remember us and used to recommend something which otherwise I wouldn't have picked up.
- And obviously able to export my data. I have been burned by enough platforms in the past 15 years that, this is necessary!
I have been using zotero for this purpose. And I know it is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.
But it is pretty good at grabbing the book detail, and I have a bunch of custom fields and comments, and I can add other stuff into the book definition like text files and PDFs and jpgs and URLs.
You can also wholesale share libraries and create group libraries etc. But it is not very good at tracking read and unread status, let alone borrowed and returned. And it definitely doesn't give recommendations.
One of my main difficulties in moving from this to other media libraries is they are all each so focused on one kind of media. I find a lot of the things I want to keep track of, and share, and remember, are mixed media, authors who also paint, or website only books, multi media comics, films, art and literary theory. Not just the things that happen to sit on a shelf that I own. Which database does that music producer / graphic artist / film maker / author sit in my collection?
Thank you very much for this detailed comment — it is indeed very useful to me. The import feature is certainly on my radar and is something that I'll start developing very soon. You're absolutely right that it would make onboarding a large collection really easy. I'll take note of the other features you mentioned too. Thank you again!
And I understand some features are already built by you, but as I was not able to play with the app (since I can't import any books), I have listed the ones that are important for me
1. I can’t find a way to add the date or month when I finished the book. I mean, I tried adding books I read this year, but all the books are recorded as “read” in the current month.
2. I can’t find a place to add the start date and end date for reading a book, but I do see an “average time to complete” data. Do we need to add “custom fields” to make this work?
Good: 1. I’ve been manually trying to do this over a spreadsheet and run a data analysis at the end of the year. Thanks for making this. My manual work https://www.prasannakumarr.in/books-read-2018
2. Multi-currency support is great
3. Adding custom fields is also great.
Great work overall!
My only qualm is that I’ve tried many of these apps that got introduced on HN. But most of them end up getting shut down and become graveyard projects. I want to make sure the developer is serious about its future, especially at the time of vibe coding adventures. I want this to be like a https://www.monicahq.com/, small but still profitable.
Thank you for your comment and for raising the issues.
When you set the book status to 'Read', an edit pen appears to the right of it (in the same area where you set the status), which you can click to edit the start and finish dates. Please note that when you set the status to 'Read', it's assumed that you've read the whole book, and this is added to the 'Pages read this month' statistic. Conversely, when you set the status to 'DNF' (Did Not Finish), you can set start and end dates again using the edit pen, as well as providing a progress update, i.e. how many pages you read before stopping.
I've been dedicating my time after work to this project for several months already, and I plan to continue doing so for a long time. I'm going to use it a lot personally too, so that's a big part of my motivation, to be honest.
Im working on a similar project, Colibri (https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri), an app to manage your ebook collection. Librari is looking really slick! Also, It’s always interesting to see how others approach schema selection and customization.
If I may, I would suggest adding support for ingesting data from open sources, for example OpenLibrary, WikiData, the LoC API, and a bunch of others. Since you’re building a for-profit project, you can probably also tap the billed services to get high-quality metadata. But even with OpenLibrary alone, you have access to a treasure trove of information that spares users from having to type off things from their books. That allows for bulk import, high-res covers, and so on.
I’m currently working on the metadata reconciliation engine in Colibri, so feel free to check out the source every once in a while.
Thank you for the comment. librari.io already uses OpenLibrary for metadata enrichment, but I'll definitely check out the others too. I'll definitely check out Colibri — thank you for sharing!
Likewise! The space of book-lover software is small, we should stick together :)
Have been using Obsidian for this which I can also highly recommend. Each book is a note with frontmatter properties that matter to me. The book search plugin[1] also makes it easy to add new books with a cover image included. Using Obsidian for other kind of collections as well[2].
[1]: https://github.com/anpigon/obsidian-book-search-plugin
[2]: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-gaming-backlog
This looks like it's a website without an app, so a few questions for you:
1. How does the site perform on mobile? If it doesn't that's a non starter for a large audience segment.
2. What's the pricing? There are several free options out there for managing your book collection, so unless there's a fremium tier (which there's no concrete language about pricing on the pricing page around subscription cost or subscription tiers) less people will want to try this out.
3. Why should someone use a web based library management tool over one that's hosted locally (either as a phone app, or as a site local to your network)?
4. What problems does this solve that others have missed? I would love for that to be front and center on the landing page.
Thank you for your questions. The actual app can be used/seen only after signing in. Regarding your questions:
1. This was initially planned as a web-based application, and it still is. However, when it comes to mobile responsiveness, it's not great — something I've pointed out and am currently working on. I'll finish this work during the weekend. Creating native apps will probably make sense in future, too.
2. Yeah, as it's only the beta version at the moment, the pricing doesn't mention anything specific. I believe there will be three different pricing tiers. There will definitely be a freemium version with some limitations, e.g. a limit of one library and 100–200 books in library, and access to basic statistics only. I need to think more about the pricing in more detail, as I've only concentrated on building the product so far. However, in general, I imagine it to be as I've already described above.
3. This is a very good question, to be honest, and one that I haven't thought much about either. I would probably use a locally hosted application if it offered all the features that librari.io offers. However, I can think of some reasons why a user might want to use a web-based solution. Firstly, I assume that syncing across devices would be difficult when the application is hosted on only one device, unless it offers export/import functionality. Backup and reliability are other reasons why a user would opt for a web-based solution. I believe that the ability to share your library with other people or family members using a link, which gives them access from anywhere at any time, is a good reason to opt for a web-based solution.
4. I can outline the three most significant issues I encountered, which eventually led to the development of this app. The first is the outdated UI that most of them suggest (but of course, I'm not saying that librari.io's UI is the best). The second is the lack of library statistics and analytics (e.g. distribution tables of books, authors, etc. or content-wise and reading activity related statistics). The third is the lack of customisation. For example, the ability to add custom book, author and publisher data fields with different types, such as text, date and number, and then attach actual information to those fields when editing those entities.
I'm in an adjacent area, cataloging my huge collection of periodicals for my vintage ad collection (adretro.com). The biggest thing that helped me that I didn't see you mention but maybe I missed it: taking book cover photos to populate the inventory. OpenAI vision can easily extract the book, author and meta data. This speeds up the data entry considerably. I scan a whole box of periodicals and upload a zip of all the images. My software extracts the info. So for yours, if I just take photos of all the books on a shelf, it could handle the rest.
Thank you for your comment. Currently, there are three methods of adding a book: searching (which uses the Google Books API under the hood), manual addition (which nobody wants to do — I completely understand — but is the only option for old books that cannot be found online; I have a lot of these) and scanning the ISBN (which also uses the Google Books API). I initially thought about adding the method you suggested, where you provide a picture and then extract the information, but I decided it was not the right time to implement that. So, I left it for later, when there is any need or feedback regarding it from users. From your comment, I understand that it's something that users might actually consider using.
Yeah if there is an ISBN listed, that will be fastest. But for older books that don't have an ISBN, if there is a title on the cover or spine, OpenAI is really good at extracting that, regardless of the font or image quality. It's like a super OCR. From the title and author you can probably stub in the rest of the data, and the user can correct it if necessary.
Let me save to a local database to manage my own data & backups.
This is awesome. Exactly the sort of thing I like to see on HN: someone going deep on a niche they really care about. The app is more polished than I expected.
The design is nice and clean. I really appreciate dark mode as well, though some of the text on this page, for example https://app.librari.io/subscription looks like it needs to be tweaked for dark mode.
I would genuinely use this, as I don't always like the public aspect of Goodreads, but it would depend on your pricing structure and privacy policy.
Feature request: bulk import of books.
Thank you for your comment. The text on the dark mode page at https://app.librari.io/subscription should now be fixed. Thank you for pointing that out.
I plan to suggest a freemium tier and two affordable paid plans. However, as it's still in beta, it's a bit soon to provide any specifics, to be honest — I still need to figure those out, too!
Regarding the bulk import, yes, that's in my backlog and will start working on that soon.
I just want a simple/quick/easy way to scan all of the books in my house and print spine labels like the ones they use in a library.
Dewey decimal or Library of Congress or whatever. We just have too many books (mainly children's books) and I want an easy low-thought/low-friction way to identify exactly where each book should be put away.
Would this help with my problem? Is there already a solution for this?
> Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.
That what I concluded after a cursory search of this space as well.
Library of congress system is way too much for a home library, you occupy the categories so sparsely that it feels basically arbitrary. It is arguably like this even for small municipal and branch libraries.
Dewey is better but most people's personal libraries will be really heavy on a couple of the classes, light on another couple, the rest close to non-existent. So you still end up having to have a system to organize the class you have the most of, the dewey subclasses are still too fine-grained for a home library, and you have the LoC system problem again.
My spouse is a former librarian and we have a few thousand books between us, across a few rooms. What we do is each bookcase roughly corresponds to a dewey class or two, we try to avoid any one shelf having more than one subject. After that it's just by spine color. You'd be surprised how well this works! It's easy enough for kids to find and place books by color, and the visual sense memory works great for finding stuff. Every once in a while it'll throw you, "I swear this book was green" but whatever it mostly works.
Another thing that we don't do but could be fun is just to buy a set of the genre stickers that some libraries put on the spine.
You don't mention (or I didn't see it) the ability to add books by scanning the isbn. Manually adding books is too time consuming.
There's actually. Currently there are three methods of adding a book:
- searching (which uses the Google Books API under the hood)
- manual addition (which nobody wants to do — I completely understand — but is the only option for old books that cannot be found online; I have a lot of these)
- scanning the ISBN (which also uses the Google Books API).
Care to share any thoughts about what tech stack you've used to put this together? Which libraries/frameworks you used, whether you would again if you were starting again today. I don't have a need for this app personally, but I love hearing the (candid) experience reports when people build nice things like this.
Yes, I can certainly be open and provide a lot of detail. The landing page is a standard Next.js application hosted on Vercel. The web app itself is a React app that uses Shadcn, Tailwind CSS and TanStack/React-Query, and the backend is a Node.js application. I use PostgreSQL and Redis instances to store data in the long and short term, respectively. For deployment, I use Dokploy, which is an excellent way of deploying stuff in containers and making them communicate with each other (and actually this is my first time that I use it). You can self-host it on a VPS, which is what I do. Finally, I use AWS S3 for object storage and backups.
I would definitely use this tech stack again if I were to start again. The only thing that may change in the future, when there's a lot of traffic, is how the app is served and hosted overall. Currently, it's on a VPS, but depending on the traffic volume, it would make sense to switch to AWS infra (e.g. using lambdas etc) at some point in the future.
This looks cool and I wish you luck but I'd probably never use something closed source for this.
Been on the lookout for an open source version but they all seem kind of unessecarily bulky or otherwise poorly maintained.
Would be interested in suggestions anyone has for whole apps or libs that work well when glued together for this purpose.
Question for parents of young kids. When do you find time to read? After having kids, reading, playing video games or doing any hobby that requires more than 30 minutes of uninterrupted attention seems infeasible.
Do we just wait it out?
5 minutes at a time. Yeah, I've read a lot less since having kids.
I really like the word "home library". What if we called it digital home library and it can contain all your photos, documents, webpage saves and passwords too?!
the "aha" moment for me would be if I could click a picture of my bookshelf and have the catalogue be ready.
I'd highly recommend a checkout flow where a user clicks a picture of their bookshelf, and the app automatically extracts the titles, versions, publications etc. I'd be interesting to know how people use your product depending on the "size" of their libraries... cheers and good luck!
Thank you for your comment. Yes, the ability to extract from a picture is something that many people would also like to see, as well as you. I'll definitely think about this and add it to my backlog.
looking forward to the feature! I tried the product but as of now it's too much work for me to migrate and enter each book one-by-one, especially since I don't have a digital file containing the log.
I also use the My Library Android application. I have about 1,200 books scanned through the ISBN tool in that app, which took a few hours across a few weekends. Common issues were old books not being found, or information formatting issues. Overall though - all I cared about was a comprehensive view to track across when we move homes in case any boxes get lost. That app has very limited statistics, but I haven't found myself interested in exploring anything further, nor care about tracking my own reading progress, tbh. Like others mentioned - the scanning is slow and error prone and frustrating. A bulk import from a photograph of a book shelf sounds fantastic, but with re-releases of books, I'd be curious about it's accuracy (reviewing and editing incorrect information is the worst after you scanned the ISBN, so a nice UI like in this app that could make the correction process easier would be great!). The single photo with multiple books and bulk import I would have paid for, definitely. UI of the MyLibrary app is not great, but it is free, and I can export the data, so happy with it. Someone else mentioned multi-user support, which would be nice, but not confident I could convince my family to scan books either. Once you get everything in, scanning additional books as they come is easy.
All I want is an offline iPhone app that can let me know if I have already purchased a book. Because with a collection as large as mine, it’s a legitimate problem.
I am using BookCrawler, but I exceeded some internal threshold back in 2017 or thereabouts (at about 3,000 entries), and several features - search, stats, etc. - took a permanent dirt nap and refused to function.
And there was a problem with the iPhone 15 camera which prevented correct UPC scanning, for which the author never provided an update or even a response.
Finally, there was this incident earlier this year when the app ceased to be on the App Store, the website itself temporarily vanished, and resetting the app caused you to lose any purchase status. And this, despite reaching out multiple times over the years in an attempt to contribute or take over.
And honestly, aside from being sorted by title, sorted by author, and within an author sorted by series first and then title (if not in a series), I don’t need much more than that. Okay, basic book stats as well, including Dewey decimal entry, so I don’t have to figure that out myself.
Off-Topic: I thought this was a web-dev dependencies-tracker kind of thing, and was preparing to rage-out.
How does it compare against the old and working calibre?
Edited: It’s paper books.
Indeed, librari.io is designed for managing physical books. Moreover, if calibre was intended for managing not only ebooks, I would personally prefer to use google sheets because calibre's outdated UI is sufficient reason for me not to use it, although it may still be functional.
This looks great! My favorite projects posted on HN are the ones that come out of folks scratching their own personal itches.
Like you, I have a bunch of books on various bookshelves in the house. I also have a number of collapsing cardboard boxes in my basement filled with books from my parents'/grandparents' houses. At some point, I really need to sort through all of these and figure out a) what even is there b) what do I keep to put on shelves and c) is there anything worth selling to a shop or giving to the library vs tossing? Complicating this is that many of these books are ancient, and even newer ones aren't necessarily in pristine condition.
I have an old CueCat lying around I was going to use to scan barcodes on books new enough to have them... that'll be tedious enough, but going through the rest manually is going to be a giant project (which is part of why they're still there in my basement).
I don't see it on the site from a cursory review (apologies if I missed it): do you support importing from ISBNs (such as scanned by a CueCat)? I'd also be quite interested in the machine vision aspect others have mentioned here (though since they aren't on a bookshelf, it would likely be individual photos of each book as they are pulled out of the box)...
Tying into that, I'm curious what the workflow for inputting books will be like, both for my boxes-o-books case, and for the general bookcase import case. I could 100% see myself using this if it was a nice straightforward brainless process I could bang out in an afternoon while watching a show, but if it's more of a manually-search-and-input process, I'm definitely going to lose patience before I finish them all :)
Tacking onto what others have said about automated labeling, that would be extremely useful too---especially for the books in poor condition, but even for the nicer ones, just so that I could get a handle on them all. I have a Bluetooth label printer that could be fantastic here...
I'll follow this project with interest for sure!
Thank you for your comment. Yes, it is possible to import via ISBN scan. Currently, there are three ways to add a book:
- searching (which uses the Google Books API under the hood)
- manual addition (which nobody wants to do — I completely understand — but is the only option for old books that cannot be found online; I have a lot of these)
- scanning the ISBN (which also uses the Google Books API).
I'll certainly consider the labelling feature and add it to the backlog.
We where on the same boat as you at the start. We tried multiple iterations of different process, but in the end what worked for us was following:
1. Use a bar code scanner to scan a batch of books into a text file.
2. Wrote a small script to use Amazon API (this was when Amazon had a public API available) and Goodreads (this was before Amazon acquisition)(do you see the pattern :-) to search for the books. I heuristically merged the book data. We manually verified it and then pushed it to a sqlite db.
3. We spent weeks doing this, where everyday either of us spent at least 1 hour doing the scanning, verifying and importing it. By couple of months we where done.
4. After that I exported it to excel so that we had multiple copies (Google drive and Dropbox)
Post that we tried various tools, like calibre, a custom application I wrote, etc ... But maintaining that catalogue or software was painful.
Challenges, we faced:
- Some ISBN's where not available.
- Mix of ISBN13 and ISBN10, but that was fixed in the script
- Older books do not have barcodes or worse have barcodes but are not ISBN at all (ISBN was introduced sometime in 1970). For these I used to enter the title and author and then used the search API to fill in the rest of the data.
- Some books stayed in the boxes. But they where scanned and put back so location was at least known!
You could replicate this with "Vibe coding" :-)
Currently we use [My library](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vgm.mylibr...)
It has a built-in bar code scanner using your phone's camera which we like. But many a times it pulls in a wrong book. It's easy enough to correct it though as the search functionality works really well.
Overall what really worked for us
- Putting aside some time every day to scan the books. Every day half an hour to an hour was doable and did not feel overwhelming. Otherwise the project looked very daunting. And over a period of time we made substantial progress.
- Now whenever we get books, first thing we do is to scan it. My partner is anal about it (thankfully)
What does not work for us still:
- Re-arranging books screws up the database. Now the locations are all wrong :-(
- When we where giving away the books, we had to export the data into excel and then share it via google drive for people to block it for themselves. We packed them but they never turned up for picking it up. These are still in boxes. We need to figure out a way for us release it and notify everyone that these books are back to being available.
Hopefully this inspires you to get those books out of the boxes at least once :-)