2D virtual bookshelves for your digital library
Problem
People with large self-hosted digital book and manga collections (e.g. Komga users) are stuck with clunky list-based sorting interfaces. There is no tool that lets them arrange their library spatially on visual shelves - by series, favorite order, or artist - the way a real bookcase would, which is how readers naturally think about their collections.
Opportunity
A desktop/web app that renders a 2D customizable bookroom: place shelves, drag books onto them, display spines or covers, arbitrary ordering per shelf. Integrate with Komga and CBR/CBZ libraries so existing collections appear automatically. Niche but passionate audience of self-hosters and manga collectors.
Market analysis
No exact match exists — nothing found does spatial 2D shelf arrangement on top of Komga — but adjacent tools cover part of the need: Booklore popularized 'bookshelves' for self-hosted ebooks, Calibre-Web offers a gallery-style cover view, and a parallel request for an ebookjapan-style bookshelf sits unanswered on r/selfhosted. Genuinely unmet, genuinely tiny.
Market · Self-hosters and manga/comic collectors using Komga/Kavita; small but passionate, vocal niche.
Pricing · Comparable self-hosted tools are free and open-source; realistic monetization is donations, sponsorship, or a cheap one-time companion app.
Pros
- + Verified unmet need — no existing tool found for spatial shelves over Komga.
- + Komga exposes a solid API, so integration is straightforward.
- + Communities like r/selfhosted and r/Komga provide organic launch distribution.
Cons
- − Tiny addressable market with a strong free/open-source culture.
- − Booklore or Calibre-Web could ship a spatial view as a minor feature.
- − Polished drag-and-drop room UI is significant frontend work for little revenue.
Existing / similar tools
- → Booklore
- → Calibre-Web
- → Bookshelf (virtual library app) ↗
Source
r/SomebodyMakeThis (Reddit)
As a business this scores modestly, but as an open-source project it has real legs: the audience that wants this also submits PRs, writes plugin docs, and evangelizes on r/selfhosted, so the moat is community rather than code. The two design decisions that will make or break it are whether shelves are a view layer (reading ordering data from Komga) or a source of truth (risking sync conflicts with the file-based library), and whether it renders spines rather than just covers — spine-out is how manga collectors actually browse a dense shelf, and it is the detail every generic cover-grid tool gets wrong.