docs: add project README for early-stage stakeholder visibility

README.md

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+# Bookmark
+
+A camera-driven book intake and checkout inventory system, built for
+[Books in Hand](https://git.opensourcesolarpunk.com/books-in-hand), a
+nonprofit that keeps books out of landfills and in people's hands.
+
+Bookmark replaces manual book logging with a guided, camera-based workflow:
+a volunteer places a book on a marked platform, the system photographs the
+front and back, sorts it into a size category for tax/reporting purposes,
+and later backfills the catalogue with title, author, and ISBN — all
+running on local hardware, no cloud dependency.
+
+This project is fully open source and is being built and donated as
+volunteer/client work — it isn't part of any commercial product line.
+
+## Status
+
+**Early / active development.** The intake station (Phase 1) is being
+built now. Not yet runnable end-to-end.
+
+| Phase | What it does | Status |
+|---|---|---|
+| 1 — Intake station | Camera capture, guided front/back flow, deterministic size bucketing, CSV catalogue | In progress |
+| 2 — Batch OCR/ISBN backfill | Barcode decode + local vision-LLM fallback to fill in title/author/ISBN | Planned |
+| 3 — Checkout station | Track books leaving inventory, reusing the intake identification pipeline | Planned |
+
+## How it works (Phase 1)
+
+1. A downward-facing webcam looks at a fixed platform with printed
+   nested size-boundary markers (small / medium / large).
+2. A volunteer centers the book; capture fires automatically or on a
+   button press (configurable).
+3. The system photographs the front, determines size — **deterministically**,
+   by checking which physical markers are covered, not by any AI/ML step —
+   then prompts the volunteer to flip the book and photographs the back.
+4. Every book gets a row in a CSV catalogue: images, size bucket, and a
+   status that later pipeline stages (OCR backfill, checkout) update.
+
+Full design rationale lives in `AGENTS.md` (also readable as `CLAUDE.md` —
+same file, symlinked for compatibility with different AI coding tools).
+
+## Why this matters for a nonprofit
+
+- **No cloud costs, no vendor lock-in.** Everything runs on donated
+  hardware; no per-book or per-scan fees.
+- **Deterministic where it counts.** Size-bucket counts feed Books in
+  Hand's year-end tax and 501(c)(3) reporting — that number is computed
+  from physical measurements, not inferred by a model, so it can't drift
+  or hallucinate.
+- **Volunteer-friendly.** The intake flow is designed to be usable by
+  volunteers with no technical background — guided steps, big buttons,
+  no login required.
+
+## Development
+
+Requires Python 3.11+.
+
+```bash
+python3 -m venv .venv
+.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
+.venv/bin/pytest -v
+```
+
+Full setup, calibration, and end-to-end testing instructions will land
+here once the intake station is runnable (tracked in the project's
+implementation plan).
+
+## License
+
+MIT — see `LICENSE`.