Books & Shelves

This is a plugin for managing both text and audio book libraries. It will use a provider model similar to Model Hub. There are currently a small set of providers for library management and services which I use.

The idea is to sync books from a number of different providers and treat them as one consistent Obsidian Library using Bases. Metadata can be improved in several ways and also written back to integrated providers.

Shelves is where things really get interesting. You can organize your library in terms of any number of shells. A book can belong to many shelves. Shelves can be defined manually, using clustering of similar content with the Clusters plugin or using LLM based chat using the Model Hub plugin. Shelves can be dynamic, including new books which are added to your library automatically, for instance when a new book joins one or more cluster through content similarity.

Features

• One note per book synced from Calibre, matched by Calibre id, ISBN, then title and author. Your own sections are left alone, and a sync can be undone
• Covers from Calibre, Open Library or Google Books, saved in your vault
• Shelves with any number of books, and a book can be on many shelves. Suggested by clustering, described in words, or built by hand
• A Shelf view for Bases, with covers, one-click removal and an "Add a book" search
• Similar books: each book note links to its five nearest
• A reading list: want to read, up next, reading, read and set aside, with the queue as a note you can edit
• Summaries of a book, a whole shelf, or chapter by chapter from EPUB or PDF, with the cost shown first
• Metadata lookups go to a review table, and accepted fixes are written back to Calibre one at a time, with undo
• Packs of fields and rules. Ships with a Buddhism pack that facets on things like lineage
• An API so other plugins can read your books and shelves

Next

• Custom Bases templates to store customized metadata from different providers
• Series notes: detect a series, review it, then apply it to the books' notes
• Make a shelf from a description, rename, merge and delete shelves, each with undo
• Ask for shelves in plain words from Claude, built on Model Hub
• Your library as context, so "what do I have on fermentation?" is answered from your own shelves
• Community directory release
• Audible and Kindle providers (exploring)