Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets
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.
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.
And then after that step it could maybe build a small library with a nice, compact ui automatically
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!
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.
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.