About

What is Luku, and how did it come to be? Get ready to read.

Greetings stranger,

Luku is a personal book tracking app for people who want to keep track of what they read, how much time they spend reading, and how far along they are. I built it because the services I had been using either didn't track time properly, didn't let me export my data, or kept everything locked inside one system.

The Finnish word "luku" means both "a chapter" and "something that has been read", which made it an obvious name.

Data sources

Luku enriches your book data using several free and legal online data sources. When you add a book, we search these services for covers, descriptions, page counts and other metadata.

Built with

Supabase for the database and authentication
Cloudflare R2 for image storage and caching
Hetzner for hosting and deployment
Upstash Redis for rate limiting
Jimp for image processing
Next.js as the React framework
TypeScript for type-safe code
SCSS for styling

Why I built Luku

I'm a CTO at a web agency, so between managing a team, keeping clients happy and reviewing code, building an app of my own was not high on the list of things I needed. I already run a Mastodon server and have more side projects than I can reasonably maintain. But I've been using book trackers for years without ever finding one that worked the way I wanted, and eventually I gave in and started building my own.

The problem

I read every day, and it belongs to my routine in the same way the morning coffee does. Most of what I read is non-fiction: tech, AI research, business, and whatever I happen to be curious about that month. Fiction comes up less often these days, although I'll occasionally re-listen Lord of the Rings audiobook version narrated by Andy Serkis.

I also read in every format there is, from physical books to e-books through a speed reader to audiobooks at 2x speed, including in languages I'm still learning. Much of that happens while I'm doing dishes, walking or running, and a long run gets me through a decent chunk of a book.

Then there's the tracking, and calling it tracking is probably underselling it. I like seeing the numbers: how many books this year, how many hours this week, whether I'm on pace for my goal or falling behind. Some people find that sort of thing tedious, but I find it motivating and I want to have the data.

So what I needed was an app that handles several formats and reading speeds and still produces sensible time and page statistics.

The silo problem

I use a lot of devices: a Mac for work, Linux because I prefer it, Windows for gaming and an iPhone in my pocket, and I move between them all day. Most of the good book trackers are iOS only, and the well-designed ones that actually track time properly are locked to a single platform, so if I'm at my desk on Linux and want to log a session, I have to pick up my phone instead.

I lived with that for years, but the bigger issue was that my data was stuck there, with no export and no answer to the question of what happens if the developer decides to shut the service down one day. I don't want my reading history sitting in someone else's app with no way out. Goodreads closed their API years ago, and that sort of thing keeps happening as services disappear, developers move on and companies change direction. "Own your data" has been my mantra for a long time, and it applies here as much as anywhere.

What I tried

Margins is a good app that handles audiobooks and time tracking well, but it couldn't find roughly 10% of my books, mostly Finnish titles, and it has no manual entry, no export and no version outside iOS. The developer answers emails quickly, but by the time we had exchanged a few, I already had my own ideas about how this should work.

Bookshelf had manual entry, CSV export and support for different formats, but features kept changing under me, and at one point the yearly wrapped lost its book covers.

I also tried Storygraph, Hardcover and a handful of others, and each had something that didn't fit, whether it was a clumsy interface, more social features than I wanted, no way to add a book that wasn't already in the database, or a web version that felt like an afterthought. None of them solved the actual problem, which was that I read on many devices in many formats and want to track all of it in one place I can reach from anywhere.

What I actually wanted

What I wanted was a timer that works the same whether I'm reading, speed-reading or listening at double speed, together with progress tracking across formats, yearly goals with pace calculation, and statistics I can look at without digging through menus.

I also wanted it as a web app that runs on any device and in any browser, plus a native iOS app for the things that only work natively, like the timer in the Dynamic Island and Live Activities on the lock screen. The account and the data would be the same everywhere, and I would be able to export everything to CSV or JSON whenever I felt like it.

So I built it

I've been doing web development for almost 30 years, which turned out to transfer to app development less well than I assumed it would. Parts of Luku are what people call vibe coded, because coming from a web background I'm not especially comfortable with software engineering, and I'm a sysop rather than a cloud person. I wanted to learn, though, and being a programmer means learning something new most days anyway.

The design and the specifications are mine, as are the many hours spent getting things to work, and that's the part I enjoy most: the daily tinkering, breaking something and putting it back together. The name was the easy part, since I couldn't find another app called Luku.

What Luku does

You add a book, either from search or manually if it's obscure enough not to be in any database. When you sit down to read you start the timer, and when you stop, the session gets logged, and that works the same for physical pages, a screen or an audiobook at double speed.

Progress goes in as pages or percentage, whichever you prefer, and the statistics show books read this year, time spent reading, your current pace and a calendar of the days you've read. It all runs in any browser, and there's a native iOS app if you want one, with the same account and the same data in both. Everything can be exported whenever you want, in whichever format suits you, with no restrictions.

Realistically

Book tracking is a small niche and Luku probably won't make money, which I'm at peace with. I built it because I needed it and I use it every day, and if it turns out to be useful to someone else as well, so much the better. I'm not trying to replace Goodreads or build the next big thing.

If you have the same frustrations, give Luku a try, and if you don't, no harm done. You can reach me at [email protected] or on Mastodon at [email protected]. Happy reading!

– Rolle