The Problem: I have 500+ books across multiple rooms in my house and was desperately looking for an app to manage them properly. Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.
What I Built:
- Multiple libraries: manage collections in different locations
- Location tracking - remember exactly which shelf each book is on
- Loan management - track books you've lent to friends
- Custom fields & tags - store any additional book info the way YOU think about them
- Reading progress tracking - dates, duration, personal ratings
- Modern UI/UX - clean & actually enjoyable to use
Current Status:
- Beta version live
- Working on improving the responsiveness of the app and addressing initial user feedback
Would love feedback! Especially curious about:
- What features would make YOU actually use a library management app?
- UI/UX feedback always welcome
- Any book collectors here who'd be interested in beta testing?
Looking forward to your thoughts! Thank you in advance.
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.
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!
And then after that step it could maybe build a small library with a nice, compact ui automatically
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.