Why I built this

I have a problem with physical books. Not enough shelf space, too many books. The usual kind of problem that feels embarrassing to complain about. But the real problem is that most of what I read now lives on a device, and nothing about that feels right. A folder of epubs does not feel like a library. It feels like a filing cabinet.

I wanted the feeling of walking up to a shelf. Running your eye along the spines. Pulling one out, turning it over, remembering where you were in it. That tactile relationship with your reading life. I didn't want to give it up just because I switched formats.

So I built Bibliotheca. A 3D library that lives in your browser. You drop your books in, they appear on a shelf, rendered as real hardcovers with spines and covers and page edges. You can pick them up, open them, read them. It sounds like a small thing. It turns out to feel like a large one.

I'm based in New Zealand. I work on this alone, in the margins of other things. Your library lives on your device by default. No account required, no data leaves your machine. If you want it to follow you across devices, Biblio Cloud is there for a modest annual fee.

A big part of the inspiration was Delicious Library, a Mac app from the mid-2000s that let you scan barcodes and see your books rendered on a wooden shelf. It was delightful in a way that nothing since has matched. It also stopped working on modern machines. Bibliotheca is, in some ways, a love letter to that idea, rebuilt for the browser so it can't be stranded by an OS update.

That's the whole story. No investors, no growth targets, no pivot planned. Just a shelf that feels like a shelf.