1 Libiry

Libiry is a cross-platform desktop application for browsing and managing your book library. It provides a simple visual overview of all your books: analog, digital and audio. Libiry is self-hosted. Your books and data remain on your own device, without any subscription fees or cloud dependency. It is possible to place your book library in a cloud folder, though. Libiry is and remains free and open source.

Key features

• Simple - No frills
• Visual grid display - See all your books in a cover grid
• No database required - Works directly on your existing folder structure
• Cross-platform - Windows and Linux. Future releases will become available for macOS and Android
• Offline support - Works without an internet connection
• Privacy-focused - No accounts, no tracking, no cloud dependency
• Fully customizeable - Colors, fonts, field names
• Quick tag filtering and editing in bulk
• Maintain your book data - cover, title, author, ISBN etcetera
• Handle any file type
• Find duplicate books
• Search - with optional fuzzy matching
• Format agnostic - Supports EPUB, MOBI, PDF, CBR, CBZ, Markdown, MP3 and more
• Works with Goodreads, Obsidian and Calibre - Import/export with Goodreads CSV format, files compatible with Obsidian (and its plugins), works on Calibre library

Visual book grid

Libiry displays your books as a grid of cover images, making it easy to browse your collection visually

Cover display

• Covers are automatically extracted from EPUB, PDF, MOBI and CBZ files
• An SQLite-based cache means fast loading
• When no cover is available, author + title are displayed

Visual indicators

• Accent color triangle - The book has a “summary” tag
• Background color triangle - The book has an “analog” tag (physical book)
• Folder icons - Navigable folder tiles

Search and navigation

Navigation

• Click Up to go to the parent folder
• Click Refresh to reload the current view

Tag management

Viewing tags

• Tags displayed in status bar
• Sorted by frequency (most common first)
• Click any tag to filter

Tag filtering

• “All books” or ”…”: Show everything
• “No tag”: Show books without any tags
• Click a tag to show only books with that tag

Editing tags

1. Select one or more books
2. Right-click or use context menu
3. Click “Edit Tags”
4. Add new tags or remove existing ones

Metadata are stored:

• EPUB - In the e-book file itself
• MOBI/AZW/AZW3 - In a sidecar file
• CBR - In a sidecar file
• CBZ - In ComicInfo.xml
• PDF - In file metadata or in a sidecar file
• Markdown - In the file content

When you want to, Libiry can store ALL metadata in markdown files instead

Duplicate detection

Find duplicate books in your collection:

1. Click the Twins button
2. Libiry scans all subfolders recursively
3. Duplicates are detected by:
   • Exact ISBN match
   • Normalized title + author match

Normalization rules

• Removes articles: “The”, “A”, “An”, “De”, “Het”, “Een”
• Removes author suffixes: “Jr”, “Sr”, “PhD”
• Sorts author name parts alphabetically
• Case-insensitive comparison

File management

Move files

1. Select files
2. Right-click → Move
3. Choose destination folder

Delete files

1. Select files
2. Right-click → Delete
3. Confirm deletion

Files are moved to the system trash (recoverable) if the system settings allow that. Otherwise, they are permanently deleted.

Warnings

• Moving/deleting multiple files shows a warning

Customization

Colors

All colors are customizable:

• Background color
• Button color
• Button font color
• Search box color
• Tile font color
• Background font color
• Search box font color

Appearance

• Straight or rounded corners
• Scrollbar width
• Font size
• Hide or show book title
• Hide or show tags

File types

Configure which file types to display in selected types.txt

Metadata extraction

Supported formats

Scanned formats

Markdown support

YAML Frontmatter (compatible with Obsidian):

---
cover: "cover.jpg"
booktitle: "The Book Title"
author: "Author Name"
tags: [fiction, fantasy]
---

Goodreads compatibility

Field names follow Goodreads CSV format:

• booktitle → Title
• author → Author
• rating → My Rating
• tags → Bookshelves
• description → My Review
• notes → Private Notes

All field names are configurable for compatibility with existing setups.

Digital independence

• No internet required. Libiry can be used both online and offline
• All data is stored on your own equipment
• The Libiry software is free and open source. You can use and customize it as you please
• Thanks to the Markdown format, you can use other tools to work with your book collection too

Performance features

• Instant loading of cover images, thanks to an SQLite-based cache
• Lazy loading - Only visible items are loaded
• Background scanning - UI stays responsive during scans
• Limited recursion - The search goes 10 folders deep, maximally