It is time. Two years after its launch, I am shutting down Biblion. The code will continue to be available at my Github, but I am switching to Maintenance mode permanently, meaning that the service will be taken offline. The domain name will last one more year and during this time biblion.se will redirect to this page.

The reason for me pulling the plug is simply a tradeoff between maintenance and value. There has been no user activity for over a year so the site is not producing value for anyone, and during the last year I’ve spent an hour or two on maintenance. That’s not much, but it is “wasted” time. Thus, I’m cutting my losses.

Maintenance aside, the development was fun and rewarding. It was the first time I programmed in Ruby (on Rails) and the first time I released an actual web app - so I learnt a lot.

At its peak, 30 users were registered (russian bots excluded), 7 of which had published at least one book for donation. In total, only 2 books were ever donated (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig, and Doktor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg). A very humble amount, but I do prefer quality over quantity. :-)

At the time of its death, 74 books were available.

The traffic has always been quite steady with roughly 800 unique monthly visitors, but I suspect most of them were crawlers.

If you wish to revive this service and be responsible for its maintenance, please contact me by mail or submit an issue on GitHub.