17 January 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 3 min read
It started because I kept buying books I already owned.
Not constantly, but enough to be annoying. I'd be in a charity shop or secondhand bookshop, spot a title that rang a bell, stand there for a bit trying to remember if I'd actually read it or just seen it on someone's shelf, then think "sod it, it's only a quid" and buy it anyway. Got home more than once to find I already had a copy. Once, I found I had two.
All I wanted was a way to check whether I already owned something. A quick search, a yes or no, then get on with my day. That was the whole idea.
Goodreads exists, obviously. But Goodreads wants to be a social network. It wants me to have friends who read, to share reviews, to see what everyone else thinks. I didn't want social. I wanted to check if I owned a book without accidentally joining a book club.
There were other apps, but they were either clearly abandoned (last updated 2019, that sort of thing) or massively overbuilt for what I needed. And nearly all of them were a bit too interested in my reading habits for my liking. What I read feels weirdly personal. Didn't fancy it being harvested and flogged to advertisers.
So I figured I'd build something simple myself. Famous last words.
Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as "a tale that grew in the telling." He'd sat down to write a quick follow-up to The Hobbit and ended up with three volumes and a load of appendices.
Book Assembly went a bit like that. Not in terms of scale - I'm not mental - but in how the scope kept expanding.
A simple search needed book data, so I hooked up some APIs. Once I had the book data, barcode scanning made sense - buy a book, scan it, done. Having books in a library made me want to track what I'd read. Tracking reading made me want to see series in the right order. Series needed proper organisation. Organisation meant genres and custom lists. And suddenly the "do I already own this?" app was something else entirely.
None of it was planned. Each bit just made sense once the previous bit existed.
I should probably mention: this wasn't a "rise and grind" situation. Life changed in ways that meant I had more time at home than I used to, and I needed something to do with my hands and my head. Something that wasn't just sitting about.
Book Assembly became that. A problem to pick at. Something to improve. Days when everything else felt a bit out of control, I could at least fix the series sorting or tidy up the import logic.
Anyway. Point is, side projects don't always come from ambition. Sometimes they come from just needing somewhere to put your attention.
Book Assembly's turned into a proper book tracker. Import your Goodreads library, organise stuff into genres and custom lists, track series in order, keep a wishlist for things you want to buy. Scan barcodes to add books quickly - and yes, search before you buy to check if you already own something.
Privacy's baked in because I still think reading habits are nobody else's business. Your data's yours. Export it whenever you like.
It's in beta at the moment, which means it's free and I'm after feedback. If your current book tracker feels like it's designed for someone else's use case, might be worth a look.
Still not entirely sure how a simple search turned into all this. But I'm glad it did.
Book Assembly is free during beta. Have a look at bookassembly.co.uk, or join the community at r/BookAssembly.
