About Bookpile

Bookpile is a small tool that takes an ISBN and shows you where to buy or borrow that book near you - local independent shops first, then national chains, then libraries. No affiliate links. No tracking cookies. No price comparisons. Just a list of places.

The idea is simple: you already know what you want to read. You shouldn't need a recommendation engine or a marketplace to find it. You need a door to walk through.

How it works

Enter an ISBN on the front page. Bookpile looks up the book's metadata from Inventaire and Google Books, detects your rough location from your IP address (no GPS, no browser permissions), and returns a page of shops and libraries sorted by proximity.

Location is detected server-side using a local MaxMind GeoLite2 database - your IP is never sent to a third party. You can also override the location manually on the book page.

Shareable links

Every book on Bookpile has a permanent URL - something like bookpile.org/b/9781250236210. When someone opens that link, Bookpile shows them the same book but with shops and libraries near them, not near you.

That makes Bookpile links genuinely useful to share. An author can post a link to their book and every reader who clicks it sees where they personally can buy or borrow it - at their local independent, their city library, or wherever is closest. No one gets sent to a specific retailer, and no one earns a commission.

The same goes for booksellers, librarians, book clubs, or anyone trying to get people into a book. One link works for everyone, everywhere.

The data

The list of shops and libraries is maintained by hand in a public repository. If a shop is missing or a link is broken, you can suggest a change.

Book metadata - title, authors, cover image, description - comes from Inventaire.io and the Google Books API. Inventaire is a free, open, collaborative book catalogue; if a book is missing a cover or has wrong data, adding it there will fix it here too.

Open source

Bookpile is free software, licensed under the AGPL-3.0. The source code is on Codeberg.