# Books & Shelves

> Your Calibre library as notes in Obsidian, with covers, shelves that stay current, a reading list and summaries.

Books & Shelves keeps one note for every book in your Calibre library, with its cover. On top of those notes it builds **shelves**: groups of related books that stay current as the library grows. It also keeps a reading list, writes summaries, and proposes fixes to a book's details that you review before anything changes in Calibre.

Calibre stays the home of your books. Books & Shelves reads it, and writes to it only when you accept a change.

## The words to know

| Word | What it is |
|---|---|
| **Book note** | One note per Calibre book, holding its details as properties. Your own sections in it are left alone. |
| **Shelf** | A note that lists a group of books. Shelves show as cards in the Shelf view, a view for Bases. |
| **Reading list** | Each book's reading status, and a queue of what is up next. |
| **Review** | A proposed change to a book's details, waiting for you to accept or reject it. |
| **Write queue** | Accepted changes waiting to be written to Calibre. |
| **Pack** | An optional set of fields and rules for a kind of library. |

## What you need

- Obsidian 1.11.4 or later, on desktop.
- **Calibre**, with its **Content Server** turned on.
- **Model Hub**, for anything that uses a model: shelves, summaries and the review of book details. It holds your providers and keys and records what each call costs. Syncing notes and covers needs no model.

Next: [Getting started](getting-started.md).