Book Box

What Book Box is for

Book Box is a reading library you own. It holds the books you have read, the ones you own and the ones you mean to get to, along with private notes on each and a record of where you are in whatever you are reading now. There are no ads, no trackers and no recommendations — the only thing it does with your reading history is show it back to you.

Everything is stored in your browser, so the tool keeps working with no network at all. If you sign in with Google, your library also syncs through your own Google Drive: the files land in Drive's hidden application folder under your account, and they are the only copy. We never see them, because there is no server of ours between your two devices.

Adding a book

A book needs two things: a title, and a slug — a short, lowercase, dash-separated name like wolf-hall-hilary-mantel. Type the title and the author and the slug fills itself in; everything else is optional.

It is worth knowing what that field is, though, because it is not a label. The slug is the book's permanent identity. Two people who end up on the same slug for the same book are describing the same book, and if they ever share a list their records line up on their own. Two people on different slugs have two records, which is the right answer when they really are two different works — and titles alone cannot tell those cases apart, since there are several novels called Cloud Atlas.

So the suggestion is exactly that: a suggestion. It follows the title and author while you are typing, and the moment you edit it yourself it stops and the value is yours — a later change to the title will not overwrite it. If you are cataloguing two different works that would collide, that is the moment to tell them apart.

The convention for a book you are cataloguing yourself is title-primary-author, which is what the suggestion produces. If you are recording a specific printing and you have its ISBN to hand, isbn_9780340951491 works too, and is what an import would use. Both are legal; pick whichever you would rather see in a URL.

An author is optional, and gets a slug of their own for the same reason — it is how the same person is recognised across several books. That one is suggested from the name and behaves the same way. hilary-mantel is the usual shape.

Reading status and notes

Each book carries a reading status — want to read, reading, read, or did not finish — plus an optional percentage and a free-text note. These are private. They are stored separately from the book record itself and are never published or shared, even if a later version of the tool gains a way to share a list. The separation is deliberate: a page number changes constantly, and the book record is a signed, permanent thing, so the two do not belong in the same place.

Removing a book

Removing takes the book out of your library, and it is not quite a delete. Book Box records that you removed it, rather than simply forgetting, because that fact has to travel: another device of yours that has not synced yet needs to learn the book left the library, and an absence tells it nothing. The book's own record stays in the catalogue, where it costs nothing and is ready if you add it back.

How your data moves

Sync is per-device and passes through Drive. When you make a change, Book Box waits a couple of seconds, then writes the affected list to Drive; when you open the tool or return to the tab, it reads everything back and merges. Merging never asks a server to decide anything — each record carries enough information to resolve on its own, so two devices edited offline and reconnected later converge without a conversation.

Only books that are actually in your library are uploaded. A book record that arrived some other way and that you have not added stays on the device that has it.