A book search engine and Model Context Protocol server built from a single codebase with two entry points. Search across Open Library and Google Books, compare prices on AbeBooks and eBay, check library lending availability, and find ebooks — from Claude Code or a web browser.

The MCP server exposes tools for book search, author lookup, retailer pricing, and library/ebook availability over stdio transport. The web app serves the same functionality through a browser UI with smart search, author pages, book detail views, reading lists, and dark mode. Both entry points share the same core search and aggregation logic.

• MCP Server: Runs over stdio transport for use with Claude Code. Exposes tools for book search, author bibliography, retailer pricing, library lending status, and ebook availability.
• Web App: Express-based browser UI with smart search (auto-detects ISBN, author, or title), author pages with bios and bibliographies, book detail pages with edition comparison, price comparison across retailers, and a local reading list.
• Docker: Two Dockerfiles — one for the web UI, one for the MCP server. The MCP container runs with docker run -i for stdio transport and plugs directly into Claude Code config.

• Price comparison: AbeBooks new/used prices, links to Amazon, Bookshop.org, BookFinder, eBay, ThriftBooks
• Library and ebook lookup: Open Library/Internet Archive lending status, Google Play Books search
• Author pages: Photo, bio from Wikipedia, dates, bibliography with cover thumbnails
• Performance: Circuit breaker for failing upstream services, in-memory TTL cache, fuzzy dedup across sources, gzip compression
• PWA: Installable, caches cover images offline via service worker

TypeScript · MCP SDK · Express 5 · Zod · Pino · Vitest · Docker

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