For months I’ve been reading my PDFs on a tool I built because I wanted to own my highlights and bookmarks, not rent them from Google.
It syncs across all my devices, tracks my progress, and lets me annotate freely—everything I needed without the walled garden.
It’s been my daily driver, quietly replacing Google Play Books in my life.
Today I’m open-sourcing it so others can self-host their own library too.
Runs on Cloudflare’s free tier (Workers, D1, R2), so hosting costs are basically nothing.
Repo: <a href="https://github.com/dshaw0004/shelfhost" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://github.com/dshaw0004/shelfhost</a>

dipankar shaw

A developer built and is now open-sourcing a self-hosted PDF reading app called ShelfHost, designed as a personal alternative to Google Play Books. It supports highlights, bookmarks, annotations, cross-device sync, and reading progress tracking. The app runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier using Workers, D1, and R2, making self-hosting essentially free.

I built my own Google Play Books to escape vendor lock-in, now open-sourcing it