Best Self Hosted Alternatives to LibraryThing (Libib)

MyBibliotheca is a self-hosted personal library manager and reading tracker for logging books, organizing your collection, and visualizing your reading habits. It focuses on private, personal data ownership while offering multi-user accounts and administrative management.

Key Features

• Add books by ISBN with automatic metadata and cover fetching
• Search and import books using the Google Books API
• Track reading status (e.g., currently reading, plan to read, finished)
• Daily reading logs with pages/time and personal notes
• Bulk import from Goodreads and other CSV exports
• Multi-user authentication with user data isolation and admin user management
• Graph-backed data modeling for relationships (authors, genres, books) using KuzuDB
• Responsive web UI built with server-rendered templates

Use Cases

• Maintain a private, self-hosted catalog of your personal library
• Track reading progress and daily reading sessions across multiple books
• Create monthly or periodic wrap-ups from your finished reading list

Limitations and Considerations

• The project is under heavy development; upgrades may risk data persistence without careful backups

MyBibliotheca is well-suited for readers who want a private, self-managed alternative to public reading platforms. It combines simple book logging and reading analytics with multi-user support for households or small communities.

Inventaire is a libre web application for building personal and collective book inventories, creating lists, and sharing libraries with others. It focuses on mapping books and editions using open bibliographic knowledge, notably via Wikidata and ISBN-based metadata, and can be run as a federated instance.

Key Features

• Create and manage personal libraries and book lists
• Collaborative cataloging that links works, editions, and ISBN data
• Uses open knowledge sources (including Wikidata) for enrichment and disambiguation
• Social features for sharing, discovering, and organizing books with communities
• Federated deployments to run separate instances while remaining interoperable
• Web API for integrating catalog and inventory data with other tools

Use Cases

• Track your personal library, lending, and reading-related lists
• Build a community catalog for a school, association, or local group
• Enrich or reconcile bibliographic datasets using open identifiers and metadata

Inventaire is well-suited for people and communities who want a book inventory system that emphasizes open data, collaboration, and interoperable deployments. Its architecture also makes it a strong foundation for custom integrations around bibliographic catalogs.