Jelu
Every time a commercial book-tracking platform changes its terms or shuts down, years of reading notes and carefully curated wishlists risk getting lost in messy spreadsheet migrations; Jelu puts your entire reading life under your own control as a self-hosted personal Goodreads alternative. Readers log books as currently reading, finished, or dropped, track page progress and dated reading events, and organize titles across unlimited custom shelves using flexible tags. Adding new books takes seconds through mobile camera ISBN barcode scanning, EPUB and OPF metadata extraction, or automated online searches that query Calibre metadata plugins and fallback book providers for covers, summaries, and publisher identifiers. Migrating existing libraries is effortless with bulk imports for Goodreads CSV exports and plain-text ISBN lists alongside one-click CSV data exports. Author pages automatically pull biographies from Wikipedia and include a deduplication tool to merge duplicate author records created during bulk imports. Household and book-club members can sign in via local accounts, LDAP, or reverse-proxy authentication to share book ratings, write public or instance-wide reviews, inspect yearly and monthly reading statistics, and generate HTML or Markdown embed snippets for personal blogs and digital journals. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.
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