A free, local-first library for research papers
Every paper has an address.
Paste any link and it lands at a coordinate: a call number, a shelf, a room you can read in and wander out from. The whole library lives on your device.
Native apps. Free, forever. No account, no sign-in.
The loop
Paste any link. It lands at an address.
No search results to wade through, no algorithm deciding what you should want. You give it a paper; it tells you, honestly, exactly where that paper lives.
Resolves: arXiv · DOI · bioRxiv · PMC · ACL · OpenReview
Floor directory
Four rooms.
A building you operate. Each room does one thing, quietly and well.
The Circulation Desk
Paste anything. It resolves, or tells you plainly why it can't. No guessing, no upsell, no dead ends dressed up as features.
The Reading Room
Typography first, chrome last. Real margins, real measure, real quiet, until you forget there's a screen between you and the page.
The Floor Directory & The Stacks
Addresses, nearby shelves, the trails you drift along. The scale is visible, the wandering is the point.
Your Private Study
Your papers, highlights, notes, collections. Held on your device, belonging to you, not borrowed back by anyone.
No catch on this shelf
Free. Forever.
Not a free trial. Not freemium. There is no plan to upgrade to, no account to make, no ads, nothing to buy, now or later. Consider it a gift, left out for anyone who wants to read.
Architecture, not policy
Nothing leaves your device.
Privacy here isn't a setting or a promise. It's the shape of the thing. When you open a paper, the request goes straight from your device to the source. It never passes through a server we run, because there is no server we run.
No sign-in, no email, no identity to forget the password to.
No tracking, no telemetry, no quiet counting of what you read.
Nowhere for your data to arrive, so nowhere it can be kept.
There is almost nothing to put in a privacy policy, because there is almost nothing we could collect even if we wanted to.
Colophon
A love letter to libraries.
Paper Rooms was built by one person, after hours, out of a fondness for two things: the architecture of libraries, and the rare pleasure of reading something slowly and all the way through.
It's a deliberate antidote to research tools built to capture attention, and to the rising tide of generated slop. There's no recommendation engine, no feed, no AI writing in the margins. It's local-first on purpose, a place to read, not a product to monetize.
With quiet thanks to arXiv, whose open-access interoperability makes a library like this one possible at all.