About coruja
Coruja is a reading tracker and a book inventory for a family, and it lives in your browser. Scan the barcode on a book and it fills itself in: title, author, cover. Then say who is reading it. When somebody finishes a book they move up a rung on a ladder of twenty, and the book stays on the family shelf afterwards, because knowing what you own turns out to be half the point.
There is nothing to log, no minutes to type, no pages to count. A book is on the shelf, being read, or finished. That is the whole system, and it is small enough for a seven-year-old to hold in her head.
The name, and the owl
Coruja is owl in Portuguese, and the owl earned this job three times over. Owls have kept company with wisdom for as long as anyone has drawn them: Athena's little owl sat on the shoulder of learning itself, and the bird still perches on library crests and bookplates today. Owls are also creatures of the night, which is when the best reading happens, under a lamp, past bedtime by a page or two. That is why the app wears indigo: the colour of the hour when stories are told.
But the reason the name is Portuguese is warmer than any of that. Pai coruja and mãe coruja, owl father and owl mother, is what Portuguese says for the parent who cannot stop showing off what their child just did. An owl parent watching a small reader climb: the name already contains the reason the app exists.
The mark tells the same story in three strokes. Two rings for the owl's wide eyes, which are also pages curling. Beneath them an open book, seen from the front. And the whole head is cocked, because that is the face everyone makes, at any age, when they are curious.
It is said ko-ROO-zha, if you were wondering.
What it costs, and what it takes
It is free. There is no account, nothing to sign up for and nobody to tell. Everything you add is stored in this browser, on this device, and it keeps working with the plane mode on. A book added on a train fills itself in later, by itself. One request ever leaves the device, and the privacy page says exactly what it is and how to switch it off.
Who made it
I built this for my daughter. She is almost eight and reads both by herself and with someone beside her. The idea arrived the way most good ones do: talking with other parents. Friends of ours mentioned they were tracking what their son reads, my godson, with a simple app. Just the books and the pages. And they were amazed at his progress, at how much a kid reads when the reading is visible. I wanted that for her, so I made this.
She is the reason the ladder cannot go down, the reason nothing breaks a streak, and the reason not reading today is never shown in red.
If coruja earns a place in your family too, the support page says what helps most. And if you feel like contributing: