I follow a variety of book and writing applications that I've discovered on LinkedIn and Reddit — in addition, of course, to building my own. What strikes me lately is how many new book applications are appearing with the advent of vibe coding. Combine that with easy access to public domain ebooks, and a lot of new ideas suddenly become possible. Here are five projects that have caught my attention.
AI Cookbook Maker — your recipes into a real book
I thought this one was interesting: you can compile your own cookbook from your recipes and end up with a real book. It's a good example of the pattern I keep seeing — take something people already have scattered around (recipes, notes, photos) and give them a path to a finished, bound object.
The Elements of Style (1918) on GitHub
github.com/obra/the-elements-of-style
The Elements of Style is a classic, and it remains great for writing. Seeing the 1918 edition living on GitHub — versioned like source code — feels fitting. Strunk's little book has always been more of a toolkit than a treatise, and now it sits where toolmakers keep their tools.
Pesto Publishing — social book publishing
I'm a member of this community, and I rather like it. I've posted a couple of things in their forums. Social publishing is a very interesting idea — writing and publishing have always been solitary at the drafting end and social at the reading end, and Pesto is experimenting with mixing the two earlier in the process.
3D Bookshop
This is a three-dimensional bookstore, online. I owe it a personal debt: following this project is how I learned about three.js, the JavaScript library that lets you build things in three dimensions in the browser. It's what powers the walkable reading galleries in my own application, Babel Nexus. Sometimes the best thing another builder's project gives you isn't the product — it's the door it opens.
The Library of Babel
borges-library-of-babel.netlify.app
A simulation of the Library of Babel from the Jorge Luis Borges short story of the same name — made by Claude Opus 4.8. Anyone who knows this site knows what Borges means to me; the Babel Nexus Index takes its name and its founding image from that story. Seeing an AI build a working simulation of the infinite library has a pleasing circularity to it.
What ties these together is the moment we're in: vibe coding has lowered the barrier to building book software, and the public domain supplies an inexhaustible shelf of material to build with. I expect this list to keep growing — and I'll keep sharing the ones worth your time.