The Reading Nook
A cozy personal-library tracker — shelve, rate, lend, and even scan your books — built by another of my kids
What it is
The Reading Nook is a cozy little app for keeping track of your books — another build from my kids, made by describing what they wanted to Claude and shaping it from there. It’s a personal bookshelf: every book has a cover, author, series, format (physical or Kindle), tags, a star rating, and a status — want to read, reading, or read. You can search and filter the shelf, group books by series, and see your reading at a glance: a yearly goal, a reading streak, and stats on what you’ve finished.
It goes a step further than a plain list, with two genuinely useful touches:
- A lending tracker — mark a book as lent to someone (with the date and when it’s due back), or log a book you’ve borrowed, and the app reminds you what’s out and what’s coming due.
- Scan a book to add it — point your phone camera at a cover and the app identifies the book and drops it onto your shelf, no typing required.
How it’s built
Like the other kid app here, it’s a single self-contained HTML file with no
build step. It’s a React 18 single-page app whose JSX is compiled in the
browser by Babel Standalone, styled with Tailwind (both loaded from a
CDN). All your data lives in the browser via localStorage — books, goal,
streak, and lending records — so there’s no account and no server, and there’s
a backup/restore option to move it between devices. Because the whole app is one
file, this launcher just serves it directly as a static asset — the same way the
rest of the site is hosted.
The two clever features lean on outside help. The scan feature sends the cover photo to Claude (Sonnet 4), which reads the title and author and returns them as clean JSON; the app then asks the Open Library API for a matching cover image. (The Claude key is the user’s own, stored only in their browser — each scan costs about half a cent.)
Why it’s here
This launcher showcases what our family builds — and the kids are part of that. The Reading Nook is the second of theirs: a real, daily-useful little app, polished down to the cozy details. More to come.