I’ve always loved reading. I’m the kind of person who still appreciates the smell of a physical book. But carrying hundreds — let alone thousands — of books while moving cities or traveling just isn’t practical.
In my second year of college, my mom gifted me a Kindle. It quickly became one of my favorite possessions. Over the years, I built a large library on it and carried it everywhere.
Recently, though, I discovered something unsettling: Amazon reserves the right to modify or even remove books from your Kindle — whether you bought them from the Kindle Store or uploaded them yourself.
I still love my Kindle. That hasn’t changed. And while I can’t control Amazon’s policies, I can control how I store my books.
So I decided to build my own independent, self-hosted library — a personal “Kindle cloud” where my books live on infrastructure I control. Now, even if Amazon removes something from my device, I’ll always have my own copy, ready to send back whenever I want.
That’s how papers.cheeez.xyz was born.
Right now, it’s a simple but functional first version of something I’ve wanted to build for a long time. You can upload and store your EPUBs and PDFs, and send them to your Kindle whenever you want.
There’s also a guest login if you’d like to explore it. The GitHub repository is linked here for anyone curious about the implementation.
The core feature is the Kindle delivery setup. It works using your own Gmail or iCloud email account to send books directly to your Kindle email address. To configure it, you generate an app-specific password and use it to securely send emails from your whitelisted address to your Kindle address.
Another feature that I would like to mention is that whenever you upload your own epubs, it extracts the books ISBN and fetches all metadata for that book, and incase it doesn’t work, you can always upload the ISBN manually and make the system refetch metadata based on that.
This is just version one. I’m planning to add:
An in-browser EPUB reader so I can read on the go without downloading
Better ISBN extraction
Smarter delivery tracking and retries
And more features as the system evolves
Because at the end of the day, I don’t just want access to my books.
I want ownership.
