A local SE browser I built with Claude, thanks to your great structure!

[Zack]

I wanted to share a little passion project.

I love Standard Ebooks and share books from it to people whenever I can.  I had been brainstorming for a long-time about what might make the browsing experience better for me personally.  Though my bigger idea of creating some sort of "if I liked this, then try that" is still percolating in how to implement, a lot of iterating along the way with Claude led to something I really like.  I know many are opposed to AI for anything, but as someone with little experience in coding, AI, and style/design, I thought a nexus in reading made it a reasonable excuse to dabble in all of them!

It's a local browser for the whole catalog (Python/FastAPI + SQLite), syncing straight from the SE GitHub repos. A few things it does:

• Filters by author, subject, illustrated-or-not, original-vs-translated
• Groups the granular subject tags into 15 browsable genres with subgenres underneath (Mystery & Crime → Detective Fiction, Spy & Espionage, etc...;Speculative Fiction → Science Fiction, Fantasy, etc...)
• A curated collections sidebar filtered to leave out single-character/series collections
• An author index alphabetized by last name, via the file-as metadata
• Defaults to sorted by newest release
• Keeps the hyper-specific library-style tags available as advanced searchable tags since sometimes you just really some Bildungsromans.
• As a Patron, it can pull your official curated categories from the OPDS feed too, which was helpful to ensure everything had at least one genre tag.  Though going forward I would likely just manually update it for new additions on the genre tagging.
• It pulls the short description for every book so instead of just judging a book by its cover, you can get a little snippet too!
  
  

It is not perfect, and I know some tags could be better, but it works!  It runs entirely on my own machine after doing the data pull. None of this would've been nearly as doable without how thoughtfully the whole project is put together on the back end.  So thank you for the work you to since it not only stokes my love of reading, but helped push my curiosity into something new!

Also, shout out to the thoughtfulness of the "short descriptions" that really took browsing to the next level here!

Here are a few photos:
1) The main page with searchable fields on the left, and then the advanced subject search is collapsible.  The links to genres and authors on upper left and in the top center are clickable.  



2) Here I selected "Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century" list and then clicked translated.  I like how there is a book count in the collections list, so I know with a glance that only 15 of the 100 on this list are available on SE (and ten of these were originally written in English!).  

You may notice the long description on the far right book in this view.  There is a clickable "...more" button that will expand all the books in a row to show it all.  If you look again at the first photo, the far right book shows the unexpanded view.



3) Here is a snapshot to see the author page, which shows book count for everyone too.

4) Finally, here is a snapshot of the genres page.  Admittedly, the weakest part of the project.  But between a reasonably close genre or subgenre and the short description, I figure I won't be too far misled if choosing something of which I've no previous knowledge.  It would definitely be where I'd spend the most time iterating in the future.


I have other ideas for tweaks too, but this is like the 95% solution for me.  I hope it was okay to share!  I just thought some folks might get a kick out of it.  Who knows, maybe it inspires someone else too!

Thanks again for all you do to support readers and the preservation of culture in the public domain.  Happy Reading!