What is this?

BookNear.me finds three kinds of places, anywhere on Earth: independent & chain bookshops, public libraries, and little free libraries — those small public bookcases and street book boxes where you take a book and leave a book.

The data comes live from OpenStreetMap, the Wikipedia of maps, so it includes hundreds of thousands of places worldwide — and if your favourite bookshop is missing, you can add it to OSM and it will show up here.

Privacy

No account. No cookies. No analytics scripts. Your location is only used to ask the map “what’s near this point?” and is never stored. The city-level starting guess comes from your network connection; the “my location” button uses your device’s location only if you allow it.

Browse by city

There are city pages for the places where OpenStreetMap has enough detail to be worth one — every bookshop, library and little free library in Lisbon, Berlin, Tokyo and a good few more, listed out and linked to the map.

Share a place

Search a town and the address bar becomes a link you can send: booknear.me/?q=Lisbon opens straight onto the bookshops there. Only the place name travels in the link — if you use ◉ my location the link is cleared, because your coordinates are nobody else’s business.

For developers & AI agents

The API behind this page is open: GET /api/near?lat=48.85&lon=2.35&r=8000 returns bookshops, libraries and book boxes as JSON (radius in metres: 3000, 8000 or 25000). Please keep the OpenStreetMap attribution. Details in llms.txt.

Who made this, and why it's free

This site is free and intends to stay that way: no ads, no accounts, no tracking, nothing to buy. It costs about the price of a paperback a year to run, which is a bargain for a thing that points people at bookshops.

It also has an unusual origin — the domain used to be something else entirely, and the traffic logs of that something else are what led here. The whole story is in the colophon.