For people whose
shelves are the
index of a life.
Catalog every book, vinyl, and CD you own against 55.7 million local metadata records. Lend without losing them. Install it like an app, take it offline. Find the readers and listeners who share your weird edges.
- Live
- boooks.net
- Pages
- 118 in 8 spaces
- Auth
- Wenme passkeys
- Stack
- .NET 10, Next 16
- Asset typesBooks, vinyl, CDs (+pluggable)
- Metadata index55.7M records, local
- Sign-inPasskey via Wenme
- Hero featureBorrow + lend
- InstallPWA, works offline
- Live URLboooks.net
What is Boooks?
Boooks is a unified social network and asset-management platform for people who own physical creative assets. It catalogs books, vinyl, and CDs at launch, runs a borrow and lend system designed for collections that actually circulate, and connects collectors through reading clubs, collector groups, and a feed ranked for taste, not for outrage.
It is a KaritKarma product. The auth layer is Wenme. Authorization is Darwan. Payments are deferred by design: every money-moving surface ships feature-flagged off until the payment rail goes live. The collection, social, lending, marketplace, and reading platform logic is the Boooks team's own work, sitting on top of that shared infrastructure.
Built for collectors, not casual readers.
Goodreads is a book log. Discogs is a music database. Boooks is what they would be if they were designed for the same person, in the same decade.
55.7M record local index.
Scan a barcode or type a title. The lookup hits a self-hosted Gutenberg, OpenLibrary, Discogs, and MusicBrainz index first, then falls back to the live APIs only if local results dip below five hits. A CLIP image-similarity sidecar matches cover photos against 512-dimension pgvector embeddings.
Borrow and lend without losing a book.
A 33-endpoint lending stack across five controllers: reliability scores, lending circles, lending chains, lending insurance, available-to-borrow inventory, automated return reminders, and per-lender policy templates.
A feed built for collectors.
Posts, stories, reviews, trending, and discovery, with book clubs and collector groups, real-time chat over SignalR, and 53 in-app notification types spanning lending, social, marketplace, and reading events.
Marketplace surfaces, payments deferred.
List from your library in two taps with condition grading, offers, and filtered search. Every money-moving step is feature-flagged off and labelled coming soon until the payment rail ships. Wishlists and notifications are live today.
One library for everything that earns a shelf.
Books, vinyl, and CDs share a metadata model, a condition-grading system, and a social fabric. New asset types plug in from the admin UI by defining a JSONB schema and condition grades, with no new code path required.
Books
60,557 Gutenberg works imported. OpenLibrary covers mirrored to Boooks-owned storage so reading lists never break when a remote cover 404s.
Vinyl + CDs
Sixteen million Discogs releases, full artist and label graph, pressing-level catalog numbers, and Discogs CSV import with release-level matching for collections you already track.
Schema-configurable
Books and music ship at launch. Watches, fountain pens, comics, and cassettes plug in through schema and condition-grade JSON, with no new code path required.
Books come back.
The most common bug in any private library is the friend who meant to return the Murakami. Boooks treats lending as a first class transaction. Thirty-three endpoints across five controllers. Reliability scores per borrower. Lending chains so a third hand-off still tracks back. Automated reminders that escalate politely.
- Lender, borrower, condition, return date, all captured at hand-off
- Reliability score builds across every successful return
- Lending circles and available-to-borrow inventory for your trusted people
- Lending insurance and per-lender policy templates (max books, duration, who qualifies)
- Escalating reminder cadence over email and in-app notifications
- Books lent
- 42
- Returned on time
- 39
- Active loans
- 3
- Avg duration
- 11 days
- Due in 4 daysNorwegian WoodMurakami
- Due tomorrowPachinkoLee
- Overdue by 2The StrangerCamus
Boooks vs Goodreads vs Discogs vs a spreadsheet.
Most collectors triangulate. A spreadsheet for the rare stuff, a site each for books and music, and a memory for who borrowed which Marquez. Boooks is the first platform that holds all of that in one place.
| Capability | Boooks | Goodreads | Discogs | Spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Catalog physical books | Music only | Manual | ||
| Catalog vinyl and CDs | Manual | |||
| Lending with reliability scores | ||||
| Marketplace | Coming soon | |||
| Reading clubs and collector groups | Clubs only | |||
| Installable, offline-capable PWA | ||||
| Cross-collection (own all three?) | If you re-key it | |||
| Visual shelf planner | ||||
| Self-hosted metadata, no remote rate-limit | ||||
| Passwordless sign-in |
Scroll for full table
Three steps to a populated shelf.
The longest catalog migration we have seen took an evening. Bring a Goodreads CSV, a Discogs CSV, or scan a stack of barcodes against the local index.
- 01
Continue with Wenme
Single button on the auth page. Passkey or magic link, no email-password screen anywhere. Sessions are Boooks-owned and last as long as you stay active.
- 02
Import what you already have
Goodreads CSV with ISBN dedup, Discogs CSV with release matching. Bulk creates assets, links to your library, and respects existing reading status.
- 03
Discover, lend, connect
A collector feed, full-text search over the local index, vanity URLs at boooks.net/yourname, and lending circles for the people you actually trust with a first edition.
A real PWA with a hand-written service worker.
No wrapper, no app-store wait. The service worker is written by hand with an explicit strategy per route, so the shelf opens in a basement and the data is never stale.
Per-route caching, written on purpose.
- Pages
- Network-first HTML with an offline fallback
- API
- Network-only, so lending data is never stale
- Static assets
- Cache-first for hashed, immutable files
- Images
- Stale-while-revalidate, capped at 60 entries
A built-in e-reader, with free books.
The reading platform serves public-domain works from the 60,557-strong Gutenberg import at /read and /free-books, inside the same app as your physical shelf.
One front door, eight route groups.
Beyond the consumer app, Boooks ships working Spaces for the trade: 118 pages across 51 controllers and 447 endpoints, behind one passwordless sign-in.
Point of sale and inventory ERP for book and record shops
Catalog, metadata, and royalty surfaces for publishers
Circulation and OPAC for lending libraries
Platform administration gated by Darwan authorization
Built on the platform we already operate.
Wenme for auth. Darwan for permissions. The rest of the engine room (PostgreSQL 18 with pgvector, SignalR over a Redis backplane, a Python CLIP sidecar) is operated by the Boooks team. The consumer face of a stack that already powers regulated workloads.
What people ask before they sign up.
If a buyer question is missing here, email [email protected].
- 01What is Boooks?
- Boooks is a unified social network and asset-management platform for people who own physical creative assets, books, vinyl, and CDs at launch, with watches, comics, and fountain pens addable from a schema-configured admin UI. It catalogs against 55.7 million local metadata records, runs a 33-endpoint borrow / lend system, installs as an offline-capable PWA, and ships reading clubs, a built-in e-reader with free books, and a visual shelf planner. Boooks is a KaritKarma product, live at boooks.net.
- 02How is Boooks different from Goodreads, Discogs, and LibraryThing?
- Goodreads covers books, Discogs covers music, and a spreadsheet covers neither. Boooks is the first platform that catalogs books, vinyl, and CDs in one library, with a borrow / lend hero feature none of those tools have: 33 endpoints covering reliability scores, lending circles, lending chains, lending insurance, and automated return reminders so books actually come back. The schema is configurable from the admin UI, so additional asset types plug in without a new code path.
- 03What sources does the metadata come from?
- Self-hosted dumps of Project Gutenberg (60,557 works imported), OpenLibrary (40M+ editions), Discogs (16M releases), and MusicBrainz, refreshed monthly. Local lookup answers with zero per-request cost and no remote rate limit. When local results dip below five hits for a free-text query, Boooks falls back to OpenLibrary, Google Books, and Discogs APIs and mirrors any new covers to its own storage so links never rot.
- 04How does Boooks handle authentication?
- Boooks is passwordless. Sign-in goes through Wenme using OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, supporting passkeys, biometrics, and hardware security keys. The password-flow pages (forgot password, reset, verify) do not exist, those journeys are owned by Wenme. Sessions are Boooks-owned, thirty-day access tokens with a 365-day sliding refresh, so the platform keeps the long-lived consumer pattern that Goodreads and Discogs offer.
- 05Can I import my existing collections?
- Yes. CSV import is shipped for both Goodreads (with ISBN deduplication) and Discogs (with release-level matching). Imports run as background batches with a fifty-megabyte file ceiling, create assets if they do not exist in the local index, and link them to your library while respecting reading-status and rating columns from the source file.
- 06Is Boooks free?
- Yes, today the whole platform is free to use: catalog, lending, social, the e-reader, and the B2B Spaces, with no card required. Payments are deferred by design. Every money-moving surface (marketplace checkout, POS payments, publisher royalties) ships feature-flagged off and presents a coming-soon state until the payment rail goes live.
Your shelf is the
first draft of your taste.
Catalog it, lend it, talk about it with the people who would actually read your annotations. Catalog, lending, social, and the B2B Spaces are live. Free to start, passwordless to sign in.