Greetings, everyone, and welcome back to MyBibliotheca! I want to take a moment to thank all of you for your patience as we have worked to enhance My Bibliotheca. We are excited to bring our community an awesome update that completely reimagines what this project is about. Developers have been hard at work over the past month, transforming a simple application into a powerful self-hosted library tracker with so much more! One of the key components of this update is the use of a Kuzu graph database instead of SQLite. Graph databases are extremely powerful and allow access to APIs as well as the ability to visualize relationships within a dataset. Kuzu is very powerful, and I invite everyone to give it a try.
For those who are metric and data-driven, you will enjoy the network mapping feature that has been added to visualize your library in real time.
We are proud to announce that the Alpha 2.0.0 update is live for testing, exclamation point. I want to first remind everyone that this is a brand new update that has been released for the first time, period. With that being said, we absolutely cannot guarantee any of your data will be non-corruptible, and this should be used in a testing environment, comma, not a production environment, period.
We are asking for as many members as possible in our community to help us test this app in a variety of ways, period. There is only so much that we are able to test before we get this self-hosted app out to our community!
One of the exciting aspects of this update is the seamless migration feature implemented in this alpha release. It allows users to migrate from the current stable build to this alpha version.
📚 Main Features of MyBibliotheca
🔐 Authentication & User Management
- Multi-user authentication system with secure login/logout
- Admin user management and administrative tools
- User data isolation (each user's library is private)
- Password security with proper hashing and salting
- First-time setup wizard with onboarding system
📖 Book Management
- Add books by ISBN with automatic metadata fetching from Google Books API
- Manual book entry with comprehensive form fields
- Bulk import from CSV files (Goodreads exports, custom formats)
- Book editing with enhanced metadata management
- Book deletion with proper cleanup
- Duplicate detection and merge capabilities
- Cover image management with automatic downloading and caching
📚 Library Organization
- Personal library view with filtering and search
- Reading status tracking: Currently Reading, Plan to Read, Finished, Library Only
- Category/Genre management with custom tags
- Location management - track where your books are physically stored
- Custom metadata fields for personalized organization
- Advanced search and filtering capabilities
👥 People Management
- Author management with detailed profiles
- Contributor tracking (editors, illustrators, etc.)
- Person merging to clean up duplicate entries
- Comprehensive contributor relationships
📊 Reading Analytics & Tracking
- Reading logs with daily activity tracking
- Reading streaks and habit monitoring
- Progress tracking for currently reading books
- Monthly wrap-up reports with visual summaries
- Reading statistics and personal insights
- Community activity views (if enabled)
- Shareable monthly reading image collages
📥 Import & Migration System
- Advanced CSV import with field mapping
- Progress tracking for long-running imports
- SQLite database migration from other systems
- Goodreads export compatibility
- Custom field auto-creation during imports
- Background processing for large imports
🔧 Advanced Features
- OCR barcode scanning for ISBN extraction from book images
- Metadata extraction from book covers using AI/OCR
- API endpoints for programmatic access
- Backup and restore the system with compressed archives
- Database migration tools for upgrades
- Multi-format export capabilities
🖥️ Technical Infrastructure
- Graph database architecture using KuzuDB for complex relationships
- Responsive web interface with modern Bootstrap UI
- Docker containerization for easy deployment
- RESTful API for external integrations
- Background job processing for long-running tasks
- Health monitoring and debugging tools
🎨 User Experience
- Mobile-responsive design for phone/tablet access
- AJAX-powered forms for smooth interactions
- Real-time progress tracking for imports
- Intuitive navigation and clean interface
- Customizable timezone and locale settings
- Dark/light theme support (implied from UI components)
🔍 Search & Discovery
- Full-text search across all book data
- Advanced filtering by status, genre, author, etc.
- Google Books integration for metadata enrichment
- ISBN lookup with automatic book data population
🚀 Quick Start (Alpha 2.0.0)
# Clone the Database-Upgrade branch
git clone --single-branch --branch Database-Upgrade https://github.com/pickles4evaaaa/mybibliotheca.git
cd mybibliotheca
# Build the Docker image
docker compose build
# Start the application
docker compose upAs always, feel free to submit pull requests for issues that you find and are confident in your ability to fix. We will take a look. We are very open to feedback and ask that you use the proper GitHub issue section so we can keep track of everything.
Happy reading!