After years of increasingly worse search experiences I decided to fight back. This site looks for book reviews, and that’s it. It skews heavily towards Fantastic Literature*, because that’s what I read the most.
It’s a bit of an ongoing experiment in user interface as well, so things might change. Might, I’m getting close to where I don’t have any other features I’d like to see so things might also stay very much the same.
You will find settings in the Commonplace book up top.
Enjoy
*It works for other genres as well, and you can add new sites in the settings.
Reviews
Award winning
Heard it
Connect an LLM and it will double-check that the reviews are actually for the book and not some similar title or TV series etc.
Glimpt will also generate a review summary based on the reviews it has found and vetted.
If you are using Chrome you can use the “in-built” LLM.
No model
The default. You will encounter some false positives. Glimpt’s own clerk, if it is on, still sums up the reviews.
My own model
Any OpenAI-compatible address: Ollama or LM Studio on this computer, a box on your network, or a hosted service with a key.
Chrome’s built-in model
Gemini Nano, inside the browser. Nothing leaves this machine as far as I know.
About the key
The key is kept in this browser and sent only to the address above. There is no backend for this site, and nowhere to store your things except on your own device.
Use Glimpt’s own clerk
Sums up what the critics think, with quotes and footnotes to the reviews, from Glimpt’s own reading of them. No model, and nothing is sent anywhere. If a model below answers, its summary takes over.
Glimpt is a narrow search engine for those of us that like books.
All yours
This site lacks a backend. That means I can’t keep track of what books you search for etc. Private by design.
The search itself does have to go somewhere, though. When you look up a book, its title is sent to the services that answer: Open Library and Libris for the book itself, Apple’s podcast index, an open mirror of YouTube’s search (Piped or Invidious), the bookshops and the review sites. Like any website, they see the search and the address it came from, but no name, no account and no history from Glimpt.
It also means you need to share your lists manually using the export function if you want to sync stuff between different devices. It might even be a good idea to keep backups if your lists are important to you. Lists export as JSON, or as CSV for Goodreads, StoryGraph and spreadsheets; what is in the files is explained in a short PDF.
Donations
This is free, has no ads and tracks nothing. If you find it useful, a contribution towards the hosting would be much appreciated, and just knowing someone out there is using it would make my day.
Corrections, a review site it should be reading, or a book it gets wrong: all welcome at thekmf@protonmail.com.
Fonts
Simonetta by Brownfox, for the titles and the reviews. SIL Open Font License, served from this site.
Everything else is your device’s own system typeface, so there is nothing to download.
Licence
Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Credit as Wu Wave Interaktiv.
Enshittification resistant
Glimpt is self-certified at level two by The Enshittification Resistant Software Project: it installs without an app store, your lists stay on your own device and export in open formats, and there is no account to make.
The badge is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Credit as The Self Certification for Enshittification Resistant Software Project.
