For people whose
shelves are the
index of a life.
Catalog every book, vinyl, and CD you own against 55.7 million local metadata records. Lend without losing them. Trade with escrow. Find the readers and listeners who share your weird edges.
- Live
- boooks.net
- Phase
- 1 to 6 shipped
- Auth
- Wenme passkeys
- Stack
- .NET 10, Next 16
- Asset typesBooks, vinyl, CDs (+pluggable)
- Metadata index55.7M records, local
- Sign-inPasskey via Wenme
- Hero featureBorrow + lend
- MarketplaceLoneSock Pay escrow
- Live URLboooks.net
What is Boooks?
Boooks is a unified social network and asset-management platform for people who own physical creative assets. It catalogs books, vinyl, and CDs at launch, runs a borrow and lend system designed for collections that actually circulate, and connects collectors through reading clubs, listening parties, and a feed ranked for taste, not for outrage.
It is a KaritKarma product. The auth layer is Wenme. Authorization is Darwan. Payments route through LoneSock Pay. The collection, social, lending, marketplace, and music-recognition logic is the Boooks team's own work, sitting on top of that shared infrastructure.
Built for collectors, not casual readers.
Goodreads is a book log. Discogs is a music database. Boooks is what they would be if they were designed for the same person, in the same decade.
55.7M record local index.
Scan a barcode or type a title. The lookup hits a self-hosted Gutenberg, OpenLibrary, Discogs, and MusicBrainz index first, then falls back to the live APIs only if local results dip below five hits.
Borrow and lend without losing a book.
Thirteen-endpoint lending stack with reliability scores, lending chains, available-to-borrow inventory, automated return reminders, and per-lender policy templates.
A feed built for collectors.
Algorithmic For You ranking, multi-format posts with polls and threads, fourteen notification types, book clubs with progress tracking, listening parties for vinyl drops.
Marketplace with escrow.
List from your library in two taps. Condition grading, offers, filtered search, escrow through LoneSock Pay. Wishlists watch the marketplace and ping you on price drops.
One library for everything that earns a shelf.
Books, vinyl, and CDs share a metadata model, a condition-grading system, and a social fabric. New asset types plug in from the admin UI by defining a schema and a recognition method, with no new code path required.
Books
60,557 Gutenberg works imported. OpenLibrary covers mirrored to Boooks-owned storage so reading lists never break when a remote cover 404s.
Vinyl + CDs
Sixteen million Discogs releases, full artist and label graph, pressing-level catalog numbers. Recognition flows feed back into your own shelf, not someone else's profile.
Schema-configurable
Books and music ship at launch. Watches, fountain pens, comics, and cassettes plug in through schema and condition-grade JSON, with no new code path required.
Books come back.
The most common bug in any private library is the friend who meant to return the Murakami. Boooks treats lending as a first class transaction. Thirteen endpoints. Reliability scores per borrower. Lending chains so a third hand-off still tracks back. Automated reminders that escalate politely.
- Lender, borrower, condition, return date, all captured at hand-off
- Reliability score builds across every successful return
- Available-to-borrow inventory exposed to your trusted circle
- Per-lender policy templates (max books, default duration, who qualifies)
- Escalating reminder cadence over BitsPath email and in-app
- Books lent
- 42
- Returned on time
- 39
- Active loans
- 3
- Avg duration
- 11 days
- Due in 4 daysNorwegian WoodMurakami
- Due tomorrowPachinkoLee
- Overdue by 2The StrangerCamus
Boooks vs Goodreads vs Discogs vs a spreadsheet.
Most collectors triangulate. A spreadsheet for the rare stuff, a site each for books and music, and a memory for who borrowed which Marquez. Boooks is the first platform that holds all of that in one place.
| Capability | Boooks | Goodreads | Discogs | Spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Catalog physical books | Music only | Manual | ||
| Catalog vinyl and CDs | Manual | |||
| Lending with reliability scores | ||||
| Marketplace with escrow | ||||
| Reading clubs and listening parties | Clubs only | |||
| Cross-collection (own all three?) | If you re-key it | |||
| Visual shelf planner | ||||
| Self-hosted metadata, no remote rate-limit | ||||
| Passwordless sign-in |
Three steps to a populated shelf.
The longest catalog migration we have seen took an evening. Bring a Goodreads CSV, a Discogs CSV, or scan a stack of barcodes against the local index.
- 01
Continue with Wenme
Single button on the auth page. Passkey or magic link, no email-password screen anywhere. Sessions are Boooks-owned and last as long as you stay active.
- 02
Import what you already have
Goodreads CSV with ISBN dedup, Discogs CSV with release matching. Bulk creates assets, links to your library, and respects existing reading status.
- 03
Discover, lend, trade
Algorithmic For You feed, search-any-book-any-writer, /person/{slug} auto-hydrates from OpenLibrary, marketplace lists your library in two taps.
Built on the platform we already operate.
Wenme for auth. Darwan for permissions. LoneSock Pay for marketplace escrow. BitsPath for lending reminders. Boooks is the consumer face of a stack that already powers regulated workloads.
What people ask before they sign up.
If a buyer question is missing here, email nirjhar@boooks.net.
- 01What is Boooks?
- Boooks is a unified social network and asset-management platform for people who own physical creative assets, books, vinyl, and CDs at launch, with watches, comics, and fountain pens addable from a schema-configured admin UI. It catalogs against 55.7 million local metadata records, runs a thirteen-endpoint borrow / lend system, a marketplace with escrow, reading clubs, listening parties, and a visual shelf planner. Boooks is a KaritKarma product, live at boooks.net.
- 02How is Boooks different from Goodreads, Discogs, and LibraryThing?
- Goodreads covers books, Discogs covers music, and a spreadsheet covers neither. Boooks is the first platform that catalogs books, vinyl, and CDs in one library, with a borrow / lend hero feature none of those tools have. Lending uses reliability scores, lending chains, and automated return reminders so books actually come back. The schema is configurable from the admin UI, so additional asset types plug in without a new code path.
- 03What sources does the metadata come from?
- Self-hosted dumps of Project Gutenberg (60,557 works imported), OpenLibrary (40M+ editions), Discogs (16M releases), and MusicBrainz, refreshed monthly. Local lookup answers in under 100 ms with zero per-request cost. When local results dip below five hits for a free-text query, Boooks falls back to OpenLibrary, Google Books, and Discogs APIs and mirrors any new covers to its own storage so links never rot.
- 04How does Boooks handle authentication?
- Boooks is passwordless. Sign-in goes through Wenme using OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, supporting passkeys, biometrics, and hardware security keys. The password-flow pages (forgot password, reset, verify) do not exist, those journeys are owned by Wenme. Sessions are Boooks-owned, thirty-day access tokens with a 365-day sliding refresh, so the platform keeps the long-lived consumer pattern that Goodreads and Discogs offer.
- 05Can I import my existing collections?
- Yes. CSV import is shipped for both Goodreads (with ISBN deduplication) and Discogs (with release-level matching). Imports run as background batches with a fifty-megabyte file ceiling, create assets if they do not exist in the local index, and link them to your library while respecting reading-status and rating columns from the source file.
- 06Is Boooks free?
- Boooks has a free tier with full catalog, social, and lending features. Premium subscriptions unlock advanced analytics, ad-free browsing, and AI-driven discovery. The marketplace runs on a five-percent transaction fee, and a B2B tier offers POS, inventory, and library-system integrations for retailers and libraries.
Your shelf is the
first draft of your taste.
Catalog it, lend it, talk about it with the people who would actually read your annotations. Phases one through six are live, free to start, passwordless to sign in.