tinybookshelf: A 544KB Qt5 Audiobookshelf Client for Low-End Linux

After getting the Aspire One set up for my son, the next thing he wanted was his audiobooks. We use audiobookshelf at home, but the web interface doesn't play well on the 18-year-old laptop.

So it was time to fire up Claude Code and make tinybookshelf. A tiny Qt5-based client that gives my son a user-friendly way to browse his audiobooks and podcasts. The whole binary compiles down to about 544KB and takes ~20MB of RAM at runtime. It's also cross-platform — Claude and I iterated on the design on my Mac before compiling on Debian.

It's limited, but so was my time for building it. Maybe I'll add more features if he wants, but until then if you're interested, view the project yourself here.