About

A shelf list that lives on the phone

Updated 1 October 2026

Book Ledger is for people who buy books faster than they remember them. You scan a barcode, or type an ISBN, or enter a book by hand. The record stays in this browser. There is no account to sign into and no login wall in front of these pages.

The app can tell an exact printing you already own from another edition of the same work. It can count unread books, remember who borrowed a copy, and export the whole shelf as one JSON file. Questions about your own books are answered on the device. Questions that need the outside world, such as a publication list, go through a short web lookup and come back with links.

The public site

The guides on Reads are written for this site. Reading-order pages name the sources they were checked against. They do not invent quotations or pretend to be reviews. A Buy link under a book opens Amazon. When this deployment has an Associates tag, that link includes it. When it does not, the link is an ordinary search and the card says so. Covers come from Open Library, not from Amazon.

Privacy and the terms of using the site are spelled out on their own pages. The short version: the library is local, the site does not run a tracker, and a commission is possible only on a link that actually carries the tag.

Scan your first book when you are ready to start the shelf.