Home book collectors struggle to catalog and locate their books
People with growing home libraries want to remember what they own and find books on their shelves, but entering titles one by one can feel like tedious homework. Collectors ask for faster capture by barcode, bulk import, or shelf photos, and for catalogues that record physical location and remain exportable. Existing apps and spreadsheets have not removed the setup and upkeep burden for everyone.
For home book collectors and readers with growing physical libraries. Mentioned from Oct 2023 to May 2026 on Bluesky, GitHub, Hacker News and Stack Exchange.
19 different people described this problem in 17 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 3.0/10
- Pain
- 5.4/10
- Frequency
- 10.0/10
- Willingness to pay
- 2.3/10
- Momentum
- 5.0/10
- Who pays
- Consumers
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
I could 100% see myself using this if it was a nice straightforward brainless process I could bang out in an afternoon while watching a show, but if it's more of a manually-search-and-input process, I'm definitely going to lose patience before I finish them all :)
Is there an App where I can just point my mobile at the shelves, click to take picture, & it creates a library database for me?? Got so many books!
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
- 1 product idea with the smallest useful version and pricing
- 4 places to find your first customers
- 17 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks