The library

The library starts as 12 hand-picked seed books (classics, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, non-fiction) loaded once when the app boots, and it grows as readers search for and add more.

Search first looks inside our local library (a case-insensitive match on title and author). On a miss it queues a Google Books fetch in the background worker and shows your place in the queue; the result is then cached into the local library, so searching again finds it here instantly. If Google is unreachable, nothing crashes.

Every book here is real: it comes from our seed shelf or from Google Books. There is no free-form "type any book" entry, so the library never fills with books that do not exist.