Shelfiecat

Shelfiecat (https://shelfiecat.com) is a project that started out from frustration with Goodreads, which has been going through enshittification ever since they were acquired by Amazon. Goodreads hate seems to be universal across the internet (and it seems like every week there's a post on HackerNews about exactly why Goodreads sucks), but it still dominates. Shelfiecat was meant to be a Goodreads-killer. The name comes from the concept of a "shelfie"; selfie but for books, primarily used in Bookstagram and Booktok circles.

It went through many pivots, and actually is still pivoting quite a bit, with the longest-lived iteration being the concept of creating "virtual bookshelves" (cf my writing on skeuomorphism) where you display your books (and other meaningful things like decorations, picture frames, maybe even that NFT collection you burned your child's college fund on) on your shelves and share these with people, or maybe interact with them in AR.

I enjoy tinkering with Three.js and cracking the challenge of scraping your library off of linked Goodreads accounts (they closed API access in 2020 as part of their "overall commitment to continually improve our data management" so it's no longer easy to get your data out). And you can see a demo of my library at https://shelfie.cat/amar.