Find the right book, and the right page, in the RPG library you already have.
Bibliotaph is a free Windows app for game masters. Point it at the folders where your PDFs, maps and handouts live, and it builds a catalog of them, right where they are. Then you can search every page of every book, filter by game system, type and level, and open a book at the page you need.
It's for you if you have a few hundred (or a few thousand) bundle downloads, crowdfunding rewards and scanned handouts spread over folders, and you keep thinking "I own something for this, but where?"
- Your files stay put. Bibliotaph never moves, renames, edits or deletes them. It only reads them.
- It works offline. Everything lives on your PC. There's no account and no subscription, and the web version below is there only if you want it.
- AI is optional, and local. If you want, an AI model running on your own PC fills in each book's system, type and levels, quoting the page it found them on. Bibliotaph can download and run one itself (Qwen3, Llama 3.1, Mistral and others, or a model file you already have), or use Ollama, LM Studio or another model server you already have. Without it, everything else still works.
Prefer a browser? bibliotaph.online is Bibliotaph on the web, for books kept in OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box or a WebDAV server such as Nextcloud. It looks and works like the Windows app, and keeps your catalog, never a copy of your books. It's invite-only for now. Connect the Windows app to it and your work is the same on every PC and browser. See Bibliotaph on the web.
This is version 1.4. Everything below is in it, and CHANGELOG.md says what changed in each version.
The books in these pictures are public-domain scans from the Internet Archive.
You need Windows 10 (version 1809 or later) or Windows 11, on a 64-bit PC.
- Open the latest release page.
- Under Assets, click BibliotaphApp-win-Setup.exe to download it.
- Run it. It installs for your Windows account only, so it doesn't ask for an administrator password, and opens Bibliotaph when it's done.
Bibliotaph isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may say "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway. After that, open Bibliotaph from the Start menu like any other app. The first time it opens, a short tour points out where to add your folders and, once your books are in, how to find your way around.
Updates download by themselves. When one is ready, the sidebar says Update ready: restart to update; click it when it suits you. Nothing restarts in the middle of a game.
More in Getting started.
Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.
Signing isn't set up yet; this is how it will work. Releases are built only by the Release workflow
(.github/workflows/release.yml), on GitHub-hosted runners, from a version tag in this
repository. The workflow sends the installer it built, BibliotaphApp-win-Setup.exe, to SignPath, and a maintainer
approves each signing request by hand. The programs the
installer carries from other projects (the .NET runtime, PDFium, llama.cpp's llama-server and Velopack's updater)
keep their own publishers' signatures, or none, and aren't signed as Bibliotaph's.
Team roles:
Bibliotaph collects nothing about you or your library and sends nothing to its maintainers. It indexes your files on your PC, and the built-in AI runs there too. It connects to the internet only for these:
- Updates. An installed copy checks this repository's GitHub Releases when it starts and once a day, and downloads a newer version if there is one.
- AI models. Settings > AI downloads a model from Hugging Face only when you choose one.
- Book catalogues. Bibliotaph sends the ISBNs a book prints, and nothing else, to Open Library to suggest its title, authors, publisher and year; see Cataloging. A PC connected to your web library asks through bibliotaph.online instead, with the book's title, which asks RPGGeek, AdventureLookup and Google Books too.
- Online libraries. When you open D&D Beyond, Demiplane, Humble Bundle or DriveThruRPG in Bibliotaph's browser, it talks to that site the way any browser does, signed in as you. Bibliotaph reads a page only when you press Read this page, and never sees or keeps your password; see Online libraries. The browser is Microsoft Edge WebView2, which follows Microsoft's own privacy statement.
- An AI server you set up. If you point Settings > AI at a model server instead of the built-in AI, Bibliotaph sends it excerpts from your books to catalogue them, and what you type into Ask and Ask this book. A server on another machine or a hosted service is your choice and is covered by its own terms; see AI.
Connecting the app to your web library in Settings > Devices is your choice too: then your work, what the AI found in your books and the text read from scanned pages are shared with your library at bibliotaph.online, never the books themselves.
Indexes what you have, where it is. Add your folders and Bibliotaph reads every PDF, EPUB, Kindle book (MOBI, AZW, AZW3), JPG, PNG and WebP in them, ZIPs included. Scanned books get their text read too, so they're searchable. It works on folders on USB drives, network drives and OneDrive, and notices when files are added, moved or changed.
Finds books and pages. Type into the search box and the Documents tab shows matching books while
Inside documents shows the matching pages, with a snippet. Click a page and the book opens right there. Add
system:, type:adventure, level:3 or players:4 to narrow things down, or use the Filters panel, where
setting, themes and publisher are boxes you type in: the filters you set show as chips you can clear one at a time.
With AI on, Ask takes a request in plain English, such as "a short heist for four players", and turns it into a
search you can check, and Answer from my books answers a question from the pages of your whole library, citing the
book and page of each claim. Searching
Reads books inside the app. Double-click a book to open it in a fast reader with contents, find in the book, zoom, page thumbnails and notes on pages. In an index or contents page, the printed page numbers become links. Open as many books in their own windows as you like. With AI on, Ask this book answers a question from the book's own pages, with every claim citing the page it came from. Reading
Fills in the catalog for you. Each book gets a title, game system, type, levels, players, duration, setting,
themes and more, suggested from folder names, the file itself, online book catalogues that know the ISBN it prints
and, if you turn it on, AI. Every suggestion shows where it came from; your own corrections always win, and Needs
review spots the terms in your lists that are one thing under two names. Your own tags can find their books by the words you give them,
and with AI on, whole books are read chapter by chapter, so creature:owlbear finds the books with an owlbear in one
of their chapters. Copies of the same book share one card, folders of maps become one image pack (a party's character
sheets can be packed together too), and a search finds each adventure inside an anthology on its own.
Cataloging
Knows the books you own online. Bring in your D&D Beyond and Demiplane libraries, and the books waiting in your Humble Bundle and DriveThruRPG libraries, so a search shows what you own wherever it is. You sign in to each site yourself in Bibliotaph's own browser, then read a book online in Bibliotaph's reader, or download a store's book into your library. Bibliotaph never stores your passwords. Online libraries
Keeps you organized. Mark favorites, gather books into collections, save searches you use often, and pin any of them to the sidebar. Needs review offers to make your folders of books into collections, and suggests books for the collections you have. Collections, favorites and pins
Gathers the pages you need. A binder holds books and pages in your order, with your notes: a focused set of references, an adventure's maps and encounters, or any other pages you want together. A binder can hold pages of books you read online, too. Step through it with Next and Previous, and keep a rules binder at hand. Binders
Looks after your work. Weekly backups, restore on a new PC, export to a spreadsheet, and the same work on every PC through your web library. OneDrive, drives and other PCs
The guide is on the web too, a page per chapter, at bibliotaph.online/guide.
- Getting started: install, the tour, add your folders, find your way around.
- Searching: search words, fields, Ask in plain English, questions to your library, filters and saved searches.
- Reading: the reader, notes, Ask this book and pop-out windows.
- Cataloging: details, corrections, Needs review, copies, packs, adventures and your tags.
- Collections, favorites and pins
- Binders: gather books and pages and step through them.
- Your library in numbers: the Summary page, what you have and where it came from.
- Online libraries: D&D Beyond, Demiplane, Humble Bundle and DriveThruRPG.
- AI: what it does, what it sends, how to set it up, and scanning whole books.
- OneDrive, drives and other PCs: cloud files, USB drives, backups and sync.
- Questions and answers
- Bibliotaph on the web: bibliotaph.online, your library in the browser.
Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue (you'll need a free GitHub account). About Bibliotaph in Settings has Copy details, which copies the version numbers to paste into it. Please never attach a PDF or a page from a book you bought.
Security problems go through private vulnerability reporting; see SECURITY.md.
Bibliotaph is a WPF app on .NET 11, with PDFium in isolated worker processes and SQLite with FTS5 for search. Build steps, the verify script, the project layout and how to contribute are in CONTRIBUTING.md. The design is in docs/architecture.md, and what each feature does in docs/features.md.
Copyright (C) 2026 munkycdev.
Bibliotaph is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; see LICENSE for
details. SPDX: GPL-3.0-or-later, with one additional permission under section 7 so the app can ship Microsoft's
Windows SDK projection, which it uses for Windows' text recognition and the e-book reader; see LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md.
Fonts, icons and packages keep their own licences; see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.