A self-hosted Goodreads alternative¶

Goodreads is great for tracking what you've read and want to read. But it lives on someone else's servers, it's built around a social reading feed, and it has no idea where your physical books actually are. If you want to own your data and catalog the books on your shelves, you need a self-hosted alternative.

Jinbocho is a free, open-source (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) home library manager you run yourself.

How Jinbocho compares¶

	Goodreads	Libib / LibraryThing	Jinbocho
Track what you've read	✅	✅	✅
Catalog what you own	❌	✅	✅
Which shelf a book is on	❌	❌	✅
Self-hosted / you own the data	❌	❌	✅
Multi-user family library	❌	partial	✅
Open source	❌	❌	✅
Export your whole catalog (CSV/JSON)	limited	✅	✅

Why self-host your reading catalog?¶

Your data stays yours. No account lock-in, no shutdown risk, full CSV/JSON export anytime.
It runs on your hardware — a home server, a NAS, a small VPS, or a Raspberry Pi.
Privacy. Your reading list isn't a social feed or an ad-targeting profile.

What you get beyond Goodreads¶

Jinbocho adds the one thing online catalogs can't: a physical map of your library. You model your home as Room → Bookcase → Section → Shelf, scan a book's ISBN, and pin it to its exact spot. Searching a title tells you the room and the shelf.

Try it in one command¶

git clone https://github.com/jinbocho/jinbocho-infrastructure-v1.git
cd jinbocho-infrastructure-v1
docker compose -f docker-compose.ghcr.yml up -d

Or click around the live demo first.