The situation: good books sit unread on shelves, and readers who want them rarely find them. Swapping or reselling usually happens in scattered groups and marketplaces that aren’t made for books.
The problem: listing a book is a chore, browsing is generic, and there’s no one to ask “what should I read next?”
The solution: The Midnight Bookshop is a marketplace where you can buy, rent or exchange secondhand books, run like a small independent shop:
Chat with the shop owner: an AI shop owner helps you find a book, recommends what to read, and drafts a listing for you when you want to sell, rent or swap one.
Curated by a real owner: every submission is reviewed and approved in the admin panel before it goes on the shelf. Changes go live instantly, with no redeploy.
Checkout with Stripe: buying runs through Stripe Checkout, and an order is only marked paid once Stripe confirms the payment.
AI with guardrails: the shop owner only talks about books. It politely declines homework, coding or anything off-topic, ignores attempts to change its rules, and can’t submit, publish, charge or delete anything. It only searches approved books and prepares a listing that you submit yourself, which then waits for approval. If the AI is unavailable, visitors see a friendly message instead of an error.
Built with: Next.js · Payload CMS · Supabase Postgres · Stripe Checkout + webhooks · OpenRouter · Vercel
checkout runs in Stripe test mode, so no real payment is taken.
