# BookOrbit

10 Hacker News commenters recommended BookOrbit and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.17 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it for managing ebooks and syncing reading progress and annotations with KOReader, with data kept under the owner's control. Critics say it looks vibecoded.

## Why people recommend it

- Syncs progress with KOReader (5 comments): "I'm a huge fan of bookorbit, especially when paired with KOReader. It's been, bar none, the best reading experience." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49431739)) "KOReader paired with BookOrbit is my sweetspot and I love having all the data under my control." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49007125)) "It provides a plugin for KOReader that syncs your progress, annotations, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49097411))
- Keeps stats and annotations centralized (4 comments): "Highlighting something in my book and then seeing it on a screen a day or two later is more fun than I would have guessed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425914)) "BookOrbit tracking my reading/annotations and providing my ebooks I've reached my perfect reading setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095801)) "I'm a sucker for stats like this and love having them centralized so that it's not just on my e-reader" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49097474))
- Lighter than Grimmory, scales well (2 comments): "I moved from Grimmory to BookOrbit due to the lower resource usage and absolutely love it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49433826)) "similar to Grimmory but written in Node and seems to scale better w/ 100k+ book libraries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49099646))
- Strong functionality for a young project (3 comments): "BookOrbit blows it out of the water in terms of functionality" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428053)) "BookOrbit supports arbitrary folder hierarchies" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49617852)) "quite powerful for being so young" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427743))

## What people warn about

- Looks vibecoded, unclear what it delivers (1 comments): "This feels purely vibecoded without much for understanding what is actually being delivered." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430680))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Anna's Archive](https://hackerapproved.com/p/anna-s-archive.md): 134 recommend
- [Project Gutenberg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/project-gutenberg.md): 76 recommend
- [Standard Ebooks](https://hackerapproved.com/p/standard-ebooks.md): 34 recommend
- [Library Genesis](https://hackerapproved.com/p/library-genesis.md): 15 recommend
- [LibGen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libgen.md): 12 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "BookOrbit", https://hackerapproved.com/p/bookorbit/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).