One of my hobbies is reading nonfiction books. Many about software engineering, but also business and even home improvement. I love owning the physical copies-- highlighting, flipping pages, seeing my progress through the chapters. But I don't love being tied to a single place. I want my library with me wherever I go. About a year ago, I put together a simple personal system to solve that. I mount my phone above my desk, use vFlat Scan (an iOS app I purchased for rapid page capture), and a small Bluetooth clicker so I can snap photos without touching the screen. I can scan a 300-page book in about 10 minutes. vFlat runs OCR and produces a clean, searchable PDF. Over time, I've digitized my entire bookshelf.

That alone was a huge upgrade. Instead of flipping through indexes and guessing where something might be, I can search instantly across books. But recently, I took it further. I've been experimenting a lot with AI and local workflows, and I've been using OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) quite a bit lately as my AI assistant. I asked it to generate a small Python project for me that takes a folder of my PDFs, chunks and embeds them, stores them in a local SQLite + FAISS-backed vector database, and lets me run retrieval-augmented queries across my entire personal library. Now I can ask something like, "What do the books in my library say about test-driven development?" and instead of getting a generic answer, I get a synthesized response with direct citations from the exact books I own, including the specific passages that support the answer. It genuinely feels like I'm interviewing my bookshelf.

What's changed isn't just convenience, it's how I learn. Reading is no longer a one-time activity where insights slowly fade into memory. My past reading has become an interactive knowledge base. Instead of vaguely remembering that an author made a point about something, I can ask and immediately see the paragraph where it was explained. AI isn't replacing books for me; it's amplifying them. It's not replacing thinking; it's dramatically improving recall and synthesis. We're entering an era where your personal knowledge can be indexed, queried, and connected in ways that were unthinkable a few years ago. And you don't need a large team or complex infrastructure to do it. You just need curiosity and a weekend project.

More to come.