Morning hacker news folks. I made this thing I call leafle - it is a bot you can talk to about books, that can give you suggestions for books you can borrow right now at your local library (at least for 6,900ish libraries it can: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).
It leans very heavily on the fact that LLMs have very broad latent knowledge of.. well, most books written in English, really. So it tries to do a good job of finding you books which aren't just another one by the same author, or happen to be in vogue right now.
You can try it out a little without signing up, import your reading history from other services (Goodreads, storygraph, particularly nicely with hardcover), or just take a pic of your bookshelf. If you do sign up, it'll get better at suggesting you things as you talk to it more about things you've read (hopefully it does a reasonable job of holding an intelligent conversation on that score), and you can also then connect it to claude and friends via an MCP or play around with the API.
bsonmez19•51m ago
Curious how well it handles non-English books. Does the quality drop a lot outside of English or does it still manage decent suggestions?
kidnoodle•45m ago
It is gonna be a bit variable - it has definitely got less knowledge of non-English literature. Couple of French friends tried it out and it did a reasonable job though!
kidnoodle•1h ago
It leans very heavily on the fact that LLMs have very broad latent knowledge of.. well, most books written in English, really. So it tries to do a good job of finding you books which aren't just another one by the same author, or happen to be in vogue right now.
You can try it out a little without signing up, import your reading history from other services (Goodreads, storygraph, particularly nicely with hardcover), or just take a pic of your bookshelf. If you do sign up, it'll get better at suggesting you things as you talk to it more about things you've read (hopefully it does a reasonable job of holding an intelligent conversation on that score), and you can also then connect it to claude and friends via an MCP or play around with the API.