What is swobby?
A not-for-profit platform for exchanging books locally.
Swobby is the place to swap books within your community. It's open source, free to use, and free of any engagement optimizations.
Swobby is an open source and free to use book exchanging marketplace. No fees, no engagement optimizations, just a simple way to upcycle books through your community.
Add books you have, books you're looking for, and have swobby suggest ideal local exchanges.
Founder
Brendan Lynch
Books are meant to be shared. I built Swobby because a great book sitting unread on a shelf is a small tragedy, and the person who'd love it most probably lives nearby. Upcycle your collection and keep stories moving through your community.
Under the hood
Built on open technologies.
H3 Geospatial
Uber's hexagonal indexing system powers locality matching — users are bucketed into H3 cells so results so matching based on like items isn't exponentially computationally expensive.
Open Library
Book metadata is sourced via Open Library Work IDs, giving every listing a stable canonical identity regardless of edition or publisher.
Supabase
Postgres for storage, realtime subscriptions for chat, and row-level security to keep user data private by default.
React Router 7
Full-stack SSR with file-based routing, deployed to Vercel's edge network for fast cold starts anywhere.
Looking ahead
Beyond books.
Books are just the beginning, board games are next. If it sits on a shelf and can be shared, Swobby should support it. We're building the infrastructure for local item exchange, one category at a time.