Libro: a command-line tool to track your books
35 comments
·April 19, 2025hombre_fatal
kps
I've been using Tellico for some years. Normally I scan the ISBN and have it look up the rest of the book data.
poulpy123
I don't think OP plan to compete against these tools, and anyway a command line tool would not compete whatever the other software are.
null
qoez
The way I see it there's a risk any of those (eg notion or goodreads) goes under a sudden paywall, price increase and big friction around extracting your data. With this you just have to save the sqlite file wherever you backup the rest of your data.
9dev
Hey, this is cool! I’m working on an open source, self-hostable ebook library, made to solve the 80%-usecase of Calibre. I also built a command line interface to interact with its database, but this is stock-Full of nice ideas. I might steal some! :)
If you’re curious: https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri
(I have been working on this for years on and off, but now it’s finally going somewhere. Still not usable, though.)
majora2007
Kavita developer here. Colibri looks great, keep at it.
I saw that you support fetching author information, etc, where are you sourcing that information?
9dev
My plan is to query several public data sources [from within a web worker on the client, to avoid restrictions], such as WikiData, ISBN DB, the Library of Congress API, GoodReads, and a few others. There's really a lot of open data available; I want Colibri to automatically pull in metadata on books and authors, if possible.
I have prototyped a lot on this, but not published it yet. It works pretty well :)
reallydoubtful
But currently it's from openlibrary.org right? https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/blob/next/apps/app/src...
Rotundo
I've been using https://www.librarything.com/ for many years.
randmeerkat
emacs already has an extension for this: https://github.com/lepisma/org-books
sohkamyung
It doesn't look like it can be used to track and cross-reference short stories.
Short stories can be stand-alone (web based), found in an anthology, a book collection or published in a magazine.
What would be nice is a tool to track where I read a short story (in anthology A, for example), and where the story can be found, which may be in more than one place (in magazine B, collection C, on-line, etc.).
This is, unfortunately, also not supported in many other book sites like Goodreads, etc.
greenie_beans
that is an interesting metadata problem that i've never thought about! (not the creator of this btw)
exe34
honestly, I've settled for a single text file. if I read something, I make a note in Google keep and transfer it to the text file when I get home. it's an org file that gets converted to html and synced to my phone along with everything else in the shared folder, but the point is that it's a flat file and I can grep or C-s.
candiddevmike
I discovered Audiobookshelf over the weekend and it seems like the ultimate self hosted solution for audiobook and ebook management. Mobile apps, user accounts for the kids, great metadata support.
deberon
Audiobookshelf has become a key service in my self hosted stack. I use it primarily for podcast management and it’s been wonderful. I use plappa on iOS as my client and the offline support is stellar. I’m building a FreeBSD port for it too so it can have a forever home on my stable server.
LikeAnElephant
Love audiobookshelf! Though I've struggled to find good copies of audiobooks that aren't ~$50...
Uvix
Second the other poster's Libro.fm suggestion. Also downpour.com. (Cheaper but not quite as wide of a selection as Libro.fm.)
candiddevmike
Libro.fm is worth looking into, you can support authors and local bookstores.
marcuskaz
A basic command-line tool to track your books read, show some basic stats and charts. All stored in a sqlite3 database and you can import from a Goodreads export CSV.
benterix
Which LLM did you use with Cursor? I suppose it was Claude 3.7 although recently Gemini 2.5 is getting more popular.
marcuskaz
I used mostly Claude 3.7 but recently been trying out Gemini 2.5 Pro which works really well too. AI really makes projects like this easy, it's a basic tool and doing simple tasks of converting or selecting data.
shreyansdoshi
Any chance you'll consider adding support for Bookwyrm exports?
marcuskaz
I added as an issue here: https://github.com/mkaz/libro/issues/4
It'd be relatively easy to add, I don't have an example format
stop_nazi
+1 for bookwyrm both ways sync
tkiolp4
Cool. I like using the cli for almost ever, but somehow for books, I gravitate more towards something with a GUI. I use Zotero nowadays; seems enough for now.
sightbroke
Is it beyond the scope of this project to also have synopsis and link to notes about each book?
Would be nice to link to reflections.
Additionally, any thought given towards incorporating standard cataloging systems like Library of Congress?
pyrophane
In case you are unaware, this shares a name with the audiobook seller Libro.fm.
ron_k
Are you saying this because there’s a link between the two?
I thought the reference simply was the word “book” in Italian.
klez
I think they're just telling OP that the name might generate confusion. If that's the case, I don't really agree. "Libro", as you point out, is just Italian (and Spanish, fwiw) for "book".
aeblyve
Not really a contentful comment, but I wish I could still comfortably make time to read.
Zotero is cool. Hits some of the same requirements here, I think.
jdpedrie
Try a short story collection. Ten page chunks are easy to consume and you get to tell yourself you’re reading literature. It’s a good way to get back into reading on paper if you’ve been away and want to start small.
null
analogwzrd
I was expecting command line financial software...oh well, maybe next time.
sohkamyung
You mean like Ledger? [1]
The problem with this kind of tool is that it competes with Notes.app, Numbers.app, Google Docs, Excel, notepad.txt which are much simpler than remembering how to use some bespoke CLI app every time you finish a book and then figuring out how to back up the database. And being unable to log a book because you don't have your laptop around.
One idea is to use a spreadsheet as a back-end (like an iCloud-stored Numbers.app spreadsheet on macOS and a OneDrive Excel doc on Windows) with a simple human-editable structure, and your CLI tool is a front-end for interacting with it, exporting/importing from services, basically a value-add on top of a document that users could edit by hand.