bookapp

A free, offline app that models a home library as a spatial digital twin in real millimetres, so it knows whether a book fits on a shelf and exactly where.

Live: https://arling.sk/bookapp/

What it is

bookapp is a free public beta (v0.1.0-beta) for Android and Windows. It models a home library the way you'd model furniture, not a spreadsheet row: shelves, cabinets, drawers and books are all drawn to their true millimetre size. Because both sides are modelled at real size, it can tell you whether a specific book fits on a specific shelf, and exactly where, before you buy either the book or the bookcase.

• ISBN scanning. Point a phone camera at a barcode and bookapp fills in title, author and cover.
• Real-size shelves. Every shelf, cell, cabinet and drawer at its own true millimetre dimensions, not a generic grid.
• Fit checking. See whether a book fits a shelf and cell before buying it, and which one it belongs on, by series, author or snugness.
• Catalogue with search, filters and reading-status.
• Loan tracking. Who borrowed a book, and their contact info.
• Reading progress by page, not by percentage.
• Ratings on a 1 to 10 star scale.
• Backups, including a silent daily one.
• MARC21 export/import, and import from Goodreads and StoryGraph.
• Phone to PC sync over local Wi-Fi. No server; you choose the direction.
• Works offline. Adding books, browsing shelves and tracking reading need no connection.
• No account, ever. The library lives on the device.

What's in this repo

File	Purpose
index.html	The landing page: hero, feature grid, screenshots, an honest "what it does not do yet" section, download links, a license-interest button, FAQ
docs/	The step-by-step user guide, 12 short chapters. English at docs/, Slovak at docs/sk/
app.js	Wires the "would you pay for a full version" button
subscribe.js	Wires the opt-in "notify me about new tools" email form to the ARLing homelab subscribe API
assets/	Screenshots from the app, WebP, optimised
robots.txt, sitemap.xml	Search-engine and crawler hygiene; AI crawlers explicitly allowed
manifest.json	Web app manifest (installable-tab metadata, not a PWA)
favicon.svg / .ico, icon-192.png, icon-512.png, apple-touch-icon.png	Icons
og-image.png	1200×630 Open Graph / Twitter card image
404.html	Styled not-found page
health.json	Uptime check target
llms.txt / llms-full.txt	Short and full machine-readable summaries for AI crawlers and assistants
.nojekyll	Disables Jekyll processing on GitHub Pages
launch/launch-posts.md	Researched launch communities and ready-to-post text

This repository's git history is the landing page, docs and this release listing only. It does not contain bookapp's Flutter/Dart source, which is developed privately; only the compiled Android APK and Windows zip are attached here as GitHub Releases.

What it does not do (yet)

• No automatic thickness measurement from a photo. Several methods were tried on real photos of real shelves, including OpenCV-based edge detection, and none were accurate enough to trust: neighbouring books of the same colour, print stronger than the physical edge between spines, and tilted spines all defeated it. bookapp would rather leave a field empty than invent a number, so this is not shipped. A book's thickness is instead measured once with a ruler, or estimated from its format and always labelled "approximately" until corrected.
• No iPhone or iPad app. Android and Windows only.
• Not in Google Play or the Microsoft Store. Direct download during the beta, while signing and licensing are settled properly. The Android build is signed; it just isn't store-distributed yet.
• Cover downloads are not automatic. bookapp fetches book cover thumbnails from Google Books and Open Library only when you tap for one.

How it works

The app models both furniture and books in real millimetres, so the same coordinate space answers "does this fit" for any shelf, cabinet or drawer. All of that runs on the device: library data lives in a local database, and phone-to-PC sync moves data directly between the two over local Wi-Fi, never through a server or the cloud.

This repository is only the landing page for that app: one static HTML page, a docs subsite, and two small vanilla-JS files (app.js for the "would you pay" button, subscribe.js for the opt-in email form). No framework, no build step, and no external network calls beyond the self-hosted Umami analytics script.

Download

Version 0.1.0-beta, free, direct download, not yet on Google Play or the Microsoft Store.

Android. APK, arm64, about 35 MB. Works on any 64-bit Android phone from the last several years. https://github.com/AndryRoby/bookapp/releases/download/v0.1.0-beta/bookapp-0.1.0-android-arm64.apk Android will warn about installing outside Google Play; allow it for this file. The APK is signed, it just isn't distributed through the store yet.

Windows. ZIP, about 41 MB. Unzip and run bookapp.exe, no installer, no admin rights. https://github.com/AndryRoby/bookapp/releases/download/v0.1.0-beta/bookapp-0.1.0-windows-x64.zip The build is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC." Click "More info", then "Run anyway."

SHA-256 checksums (also published as SHA256SUMS.txt on the release):

7304092e373e3448c3e78b1ddbb761b67dce19e22f5763090ceb8ea488816ba2  bookapp-0.1.0-android-arm64.apk
d783b253bc41637303096373cc4618b88fdfe22a3baaba302efb46fb811985bc  bookapp-0.1.0-windows-x64.zip

Older versions and full release notes: https://github.com/AndryRoby/bookapp/releases

Docs: step-by-step guide at https://arling.sk/bookapp/docs/, Slovak version at https://arling.sk/bookapp/docs/sk/.

Run locally

There is no build step for this repo. It's static files.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗