kleib3ry — 3D Virtual Personal Library

Demo Video — a walk through the library.

Imagine going into a game-like 3D environment, picking up a book from your ebook collection and browsing through it. Imagine sitting in a virtual lakeside cabin reading PDFs and EPUBs and annotating them. Imagine browsing your ebook collection in virtual bookshelves rather than folders on your computer. Imagine having a virtual cat bringing you random books to read.

This, at its core, is what this project is all about. I started building it after a conversation on the fact that there's a stark difference between a collection of physical books and of digital books – we rarely browse through the digital ones.

Please be aware that this is a fun little side project – a (tech) demo for something I would like to have; something I would love someone else to build in a fully-fledged, more beautiful way.

Some Noteworthy Features

• Libraries (or savegames) are purely text-based and can be put under version control.
• Maps can be defined and hence designed by changing the library.json in the .library folder within a library. The default map is a lakeside cabin in the woods, and the room reloads while you are standing in it.
• Nothing shelves itself. A scan stacks your books in moving boxes on the floor; unpacking and sorting is something for you to do.
• There is a cat and a delivery person; they can deliver food (not real), random books, as well as arXiv papers freshly downloaded from the internet.
• It is not only about books: Records (audio files) for the record player, pictures for the frames, tapes (video files) for the television, and an arcade machine that is a real CHIP-8 interpreter.

Getting Your Own Library

There Are Two Ways to Run It

Both are the same program over the same library folder — see docs/modes.md. The desktop app is built and released for Windows; on macOS and Linux the container is the way in, and it is the same room in a browser tab.

Desktop Application

The easiest way to get started is to download the current release (kleib3ry.exe) and point it towards the demo library.

If you want to go the "developer route", start like this:

npm install
npm run assets
npm run tauri:dev

Then Choose Folder…, then Scan.

npm run tauri:build makes a Windows installer and a standalone .exe.

Hosted Web-Application

Hosted, in a container — the same library served to a browser:

docker build -t kleib3ry .
docker run --rm -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 -v /path/to/your/library:/library kleib3ry

Open http://localhost:8080 and press Scan once. There are no accounts and no TLS, so it is bound to this machine above; opening it to the rest of the house is -p 8080:8080, and a decision worth making deliberately (docs/docker.md).

There Is a Demo Library

demo-data/demo-library/ is a complete, freely-licensed library folder: ten Standard Ebooks titles, two records, two pictures, a tape and a Pong cartridge. Point the desktop app at it, or mount it:

docker run --rm -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 -v "$PWD/demo-data/demo-library:/library" kleib3ry

Credits and licences in its own README — that folder is other people's work and is not covered by this project's MIT licence.

Your Library Folder

The application runs on top of a library folder. This folder contains, for example, books, music and videos. It also contains the current state of the virtual library, the "savegame."

My Library/
  books/        your PDFs and EPUBs
  music/        one record per file
  artwork/      one picture per file
  video/        one tape per file
  roms/         one game cartridge per .ch8 file
  .library/     everything the app writes — created for you

Only books/ is needed. The app never writes among your books and never rewrites library.json. See docs/library-folder.md.

A Note on the Name

The name, derived from my last name "Kleiber," is incredibly silly and, well, cringe. It's Sergej's fault who came up with it, argued for the "3" (3D, obviously), and ultimately talked me into it.