You have hundreds — maybe thousands — of books. You’d love a proper catalogue: searchable, shareable, yours. But who has the time?
I come to your home and do it for you.
Every book scanned, identified by exact edition, and delivered as a personal website and spreadsheet you own forever.
What you get
A complete catalogue of your books — title, author, publisher, edition, ISBN, cover image. We capture the exact edition you own, not just “a copy of this title.”
A personal website displaying your collection — shareable with friends, or kept private. Yours to keep.
Spreadsheet export — your full catalogue as a CSV file you can open in Excel, Google Sheets, or anything else. Your data, portable forever.
The Marginalia app — with your library already loaded. Add new books yourself going forward.
How it works
- We talk — you tell me roughly how many books you have and where they live (one room? scattered across the house?)
- We book a session — I come to your home with the app and work through your shelves
- You get your catalogue — within a few days, your website is live and exports are ready
Most cataloguing happens at around 50–60 books per hour, depending on how accessible your shelves are and how many older books need manual entry.
| Books | Time estimate |
|---|---|
| 300 | Half a day |
| 500 | One day |
| 1,000 | 2 days |
| 2,000 | 4–5 days |
| 3,000+ | A week or more |
For larger libraries, we can spread sessions across multiple visits.
Pricing
I want to be transparent about how this is priced.
The cataloguer is paid £20/hour. On top of that, there’s travel, the time I spend setting up your website and exports, and the cost of running the service. That’s how I arrive at a per-book rate that decreases as your collection grows:
| Books | Per book |
|---|---|
| First 500 | £0.70 |
| 501–1,000 | £0.55 |
| 1,001–2,000 | £0.45 |
| 2,000+ | £0.35 |
£25 booking fee covers travel within Greater London and setup. For the rest of the UK, you cover transport and accommodation instead — we’ll work out the details.
Examples:
- 300 books → £235
- 1,000 books → £650
- 2,500 books → £1,275
For very large or unusual collections — estate libraries, institutional archives — get in touch and we’ll work something out.
If this is out of reach but you have an impressive library that deserves to be catalogued and shared, contact me anyway. Stories and people matter more than money. Maybe we can figure something out.
A gift for the reader in your life
Know someone with books in piles, on stairs, double-stacked and unsorted? A cataloguing session makes a genuinely useful gift.
I can provide a gift voucher for Christmas — they book a session whenever suits them in the new year.
Being honest
This service uses Marginalia, an app I’m building for cataloguing physical books. It’s new — you’d be among the first to use it.
That means:
- The app is focused on cataloguing for now; more features are coming
- Your feedback directly shapes what gets built next
- If anything goes wrong, you have my email and I’ll fix it
What I can promise: your data is yours. The export works today. Even if Marginalia disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have your spreadsheet and your website files.
About
I’m Ela. I run Kivi Studio, a small software consultancy in London. I’m building Marginalia because I believe in physical books, in knowing what you own, and in technology that serves people rather than extracting from them.
The Home Librarian is partly a service and partly an experiment — can I build something useful, local, and sustainable? Let’s find out.
Based in South East London, serving Greater London — and anywhere in the UK if you cover travel and accommodation from London.