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Book Spotter

Point your phone at a bookshelf and it finds the books you are looking for.

Live on the App Store and Google PlayStatus as of November 12, 2026

Published on both stores, with its own site at bookspotter.app.

  • Book Spotter on iPhone with a green box around the spine of Treasure Island and a FOUND banner
  • Book Spotter on iPhone with a yellow box around a Roald Dahl spine and an AUTHOR SPOTTED banner
  • The Book Spotter book list on Android
What it does

One spine among several hundred

Book Spotter reads the spines on a shelf through the camera and draws a box around every title on your list, in real time. It was built for the places where finding one book means reading several hundred spines: used bookstores, libraries, estate sales, and reseller sourcing trips.

All of the text recognition runs on the phone. No photos and no text leave the device, and it keeps working with no signal in the back corner of a bookstore.

  • Live text recognition with a box over each matching spine: yellow for a close match, green for a confident one
  • A FOUND banner, with an optional vibration, so you can scan a shelf without staring at the screen
  • Search for several titles at once, or for an author on their own
  • A book list you can also manage from a web page on a computer
  • Free for up to five books, with three monthly Search Plus plans above that

At a glance

Status
Live on the App Store and Google Play
Platforms
iPhone (iOS 17 and later) and Android
Price
Free, with optional monthly subscriptions
Privacy
Recognition runs on the device
Links
bookspotter.app, App Store, Google Play

Built with

  • SwiftUI
  • AVFoundation and Vision
  • StoreKit 2
  • Kotlin and Jetpack Compose
  • CameraX and ML Kit
  • Play Billing
  • Cloudflare Workers, Hono, and D1
  • Cloudflare Pages
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Need software like this built?

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