Kongdong — Thai Reading Tracker & Book Catalog

The Problem

Thai readers track their books in notes apps, spreadsheets, or not at all. The big international reading trackers barely know Thai titles, can't search by a Thai ISBN, and don't render Thai text well — so the "to read" pile keeps growing and nobody remembers how far they got.

The Solution

Kongdong is a mobile-first reading tracker built for Thai readers, backed by a public catalog of more than 61,000 Thai books. Find a book, add it to your shelf, start the reading timer, and the app keeps the rest — progress, reading speed, streaks, and a yearly Rewind.

• Five-tab app — Home, My Books, Add, Stats, and Community, the same layout on the web and in the native app
• Add a book three ways — search the catalog, type an ISBN, or enter it by hand; books added with an ISBN feed back into the shared catalog
• Rich book model — authors and translators, format, reading status, rating, series, collections, wishlist, plus purchase and loan logs
• Reading timer with ambient music — save the page or chapter you reached and get progress % and reading speed automatically
• Stats, book calendar, and a yearly Rewind — books finished, pages read, monthly charts, and a top-5 of the year
• Community — reviews from real readers with likes and comments, plus a news feed
• Public, SEO-ready catalog — browsable book, author, publisher, category, and tag pages with sitemaps and per-source indexing control
• Admin panel — datatables for books, catalog, and reference data; catalog import from JSON, CSV, or Excel; activity log and roles
• Native companion app — a Flutter app on a dedicated mobile API with its own token auth
• PDPA-ready — versioned privacy policy and terms with recorded consent

Engineering Highlights

• One catalog, two kinds of rows — the ownerless master catalog is kept apart from personal libraries; user contributions are matched by ISBN or title before anything is written, so the shared table doesn't fill with duplicates
• Thai typography done properly — self-hosted Noto Sans Thai for headings and Sarabun for content, with size-adjusted metrics so Thai text sits evenly beside Latin, and Thai-safe text clamping
• A warm "reading nook" design system — every colour comes from theme tokens shared by the web app and the Flutter app
• Tested against a real database — framework-free unit tests, Postgres integration tests, and Playwright end-to-end runs
• Self-hosted on its own server, built and deployed with its own scripts

Result

Live at kongdong.app: a calm, Thai-first place to keep every book you own, are reading, or want next — with a catalog of 61,000+ titles anyone can browse without signing up.