Beta. Books & Shelves is not released yet. These pages describe the build in progress.
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.