BookFriends

Your friends, in the margins

BookFriends is a little online library where friends read the same books and talk about them paragraph by paragraph.

Open the library

Dracula · Chapter I. Jonathan Harker’s Journal

“Do you know what day it is?” I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again:

“Oh, yes! I know that! I know that, but do you know what day it is?” On my saying that I did not understand, she went on:

Paragraph 16 · 4 comments

Pedro 3 hours ago

Jonathan. Buddy. When a terrified old lady asks what day it is, you listen.

Ana 2 hours ago

He’s too busy writing down chicken recipes for Mina.

Lia 1 hour ago

Read this in bed with the lights off. Bad idea.

Pedro 30 minutes ago Spoiler

BookFriends on a phone: a chapter of Dracula with a comment bubble after each paragraph BookFriends on a phone: the card to pick up where you left off and what friends did lately BookFriends on a phone: the bookshelf, with the initials of the friends reading each book

Made for phones

Reading

Swipe to the next chapter, choose dark, light or sepia, and tap the bubble after any paragraph to see what your friends said.

What's new

The shelf opens on what happened while you were away. Comments from chapters you haven’t reached show up without their text.

Bookshelf

Every cover shows which friends are reading it and where. Installed on the home screen, it saves the next chapters to read offline.

Open the library

What it does

Every paragraph gets its own bubble , spoilers stay blurred until you get there, your bookmark follows you , and the next chapters wait offline for the subway.

Also @mentions, phone notifications, search inside a book, ratings and reviews, book requests and three languages.

Every feature, in the README

The numbers

151 KB

to open the shelf for the first time on mobile data. It was 1.7 MB before small covers and compressed pages.

164

automatic checks before every release: unit tests, and a real browser at phone and computer sizes.

3

languages, picked from the browser: Português, Español and English.

Built with an AI

Two Women Reading, a Japanese woodblock print by Yashima Gakutei: two women in kimonos read the same page, one pointing at a line

Asked for in plain words

Every line of code was written by Claude Code, from requests like “the bar jumps when I scroll up on my phone” or “make the dark theme look like this screenshot”.

Small, cheap and backed up

Node.js, Express and SQLite on a free 1 GB server. Everything is copied every night to a PC at home, and GitHub sends an email if the site goes down.

Read the code

Send an

Opens WhatsApp, or your phone’s share menu, with the invitation and the link ready to send.