A few days ago I shared how I built a collaborative book platform with no admins and no gatekeepers. Today I'm happy to report: we're live, and the latest update just dropped some features I'm genuinely excited about.
What's new
📚 Drag & Drop Book Covers — Authors can now upload cover images directly via DnD. No friction, no uploads page, just drop it in.
🖼️ Chapter Images — Same for chapters. Visual storytelling is now a first-class citizen on CrowdBooks.
🔗 Share Buttons with OG support — Every book now has native share buttons for Telegram, X, Facebook, and dev.to — plus a copy-link button. All with proper Open Graph metadata, so links actually look good when shared.
The UI still needs some CSS love (it's a living project, after all), but the core is solid and working.
Oh, and did I mention?
It runs on a €1/month VPS. Yes, really. Proof that you don't need AWS budgets to ship something meaningful.
The admin side of CrowdBooks is also becoming a blueprint — we're taking the lessons learned here directly into our CMS, which follows a very similar architecture.
What's coming next
We're building an Android reader app — and it won't just be for reading. You'll be able to write books directly in the app, with your content saved to Codeberg or Forgejo. One tap to publish straight to CrowdBooks.
Git as the backend. One-click publishing. No gatekeepers.
The app will be built with Forge4D, our own app framework based on Godot 4.6. Will it work? Honestly — we're not 100% sure yet. That's the fun part. If Godot turns out to be the wrong tool for the job, we'll fall back to Jetpack Compose. But we love a good experiment.
Follow me to stay updated.
If you missed the first post: CrowdBooks is a platform built on Git-Repos where the community decides what gets published. No central authority. No paywall. Books are collaborative by design.
And yes, The Third Attempt is already on there. At least the first chapter. I have to deploy the rest chapters on Codeberg and then you may read the whole book 😄
2026 - The rewrite begins is also online. It's an open book, so you are invited to add chapters. It's based on the novell "The Egg" from Andy Weir. Also please read the original. It's worth it.
License: libera — because knowledge should be free.
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