Book Bat is a free web app for cataloguing your own book collection. Point your phone at a book’s barcode and it pulls in the cover, title, author and publisher — building your shelf in seconds. Add ratings, notes, tags and reading status, then search, filter and sort however you like.

And it’s truly yours: no account, no cloud, no tracking. Everything stays on your device and works offline, and you can export your shelf to a spreadsheet, Goodreads or LibraryThing whenever you want. Scan it, shelve it, own your data.

Try the live app.

Under the hood

Two open-source apps: <Book Bat>, a Svelte 5 editor for scanning and managing the library, and <Baobab>, an Astro 6 site for browsing and sharing it. TypeScript, Vite, html5-qrcode barcode scanning, installable PWA, deployed on Cloudflare Workers. Source on GitHub.

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