Reading Buddy

Problem: Lightweight Local Reading Circles

Small reading groups often do not need a heavyweight collaboration platform, but they still need concrete primitives: track the books being read, filter by topic or tag, organize a room with start and end states, and exchange notes at scheduled times. reading-buddy targets that workflow by treating books, rooms, and chat as local CLI-managed objects.

How It Works: Books, Rooms, and Messages

• Book registry: stores title, author, description, cover, tags, and categories; supports search by title, author, or description, plus filtering by tag or category.
• Virtual reading rooms: creates a room around a book, sets availability and capacity limits, and tracks states such as not started, in progress, and ended.
• Conversation records: supports text messages and special insight-sharing messages, with saved and exportable chat history.
  The implementation is oriented toward Node.js + TypeScript, SQLite, Commander.js, and EventEmitter, which fits a local-first prototype that can later be extended with WebSocket-style communication.

Boundaries

This skill is best suited to local experiments, small reading circles, and CLI workflows. Multi-user authentication, cloud sync, permission controls, and mobile access would require additional engineering. Real-time chat depends on local event handling and is not a ready-made distributed service.