About the library

Paperhall is a curated digital library — over three hundred well-known books kept locally, read quietly as real, page-turning books. It was built to feel like walking into a library, not opening a bookstore.

What's on the shelves

A balanced collection across fiction, philosophy, science, history, poetry, drama, essays, children's books, adventure, mystery, global classics, self & stoic thought, sci-fi and memoir. Every book is in the public domain — sourced from Project Gutenberg and catalogued with a hand-written summary.

How it works

• One curated manifest (data/books.json) lists every title in the library.
• A local ingestion pipeline downloads + cleans each text once and stores it on disk.
• Metadata lives in that static JSON manifest; book content sits under storage/books/ as plain HTML.
• At read-time, the app never touches the network — it just reads from your disk.
• Your shelf, bookmarks and reading progress stay in your browser's localStorage.

Reading it

The reader is designed to recede. A warm reading surface, generous margins, three themes (paper, sepia, night), adjustable type, a subtle progress rail at the bottom of the page. Press f to enter focus mode, tfor the table of contents.

Built slowly, read slowly.