Insurgently

Obsidian plugin· Active · beta · not yet released

Books & Shelves

Shelves across Obsidian, Calibre and Audible, as an Obsidian plugin over the shelf engine.

Books & Shelves roadmap

What's planned for Books & Shelves, release by release. The order can change as people use it. Questions and ideas are welcome in the repo's Discussions. How the three plugins fit together, and where their work reaches outside Obsidian, is on the roadmap across the plugins.

  1. 0.1Beta3 items
  2. 0.2Community directory2 items
  3. 0.3Series1 item
  4. 0.4Shelves through the API1 item
  5. 0.5Your shelves in Claude2 items
Built so far

notes synced from Calibre with undo; covers from Calibre, Open Library and Google Books; shelves by suggestion or description, with the Shelf view and similar books; a reading list with a queue you can edit by hand; one-page summaries and chapter notes; metadata lookups with review; a write queue that checks each change to Calibre and can undo it; background jobs and resync; packs; an API other plugins read books through.

0.1 — Beta

next

A public beta through BRAT, alongside Model Hub and Clusters.

  • Screenshots and a short demo for the README and the guide
  • A real library end to end: sync, covers, shelves and a summary, with the costs in Model Hub's ledger checked against the estimates
  • Tag 0.1.0; a beta thread on the Obsidian forum

0.2 — Community directory

planned
  • Submission to the Obsidian community directory, and fixes from its review. This needs Model Hub released first
  • A manifest description that starts with a verb, as the directory asks

0.3 — Series

planned
  • Series notes: detect a series, review it, then apply it to the books' notes

0.4 — Shelves through the API

planned

Today the API only reads: books, a book's file, a PDF's text and a shelf's members. Shelves are made and changed only by the plugin's own commands.

  • Shelf operations in the API: make a shelf (from a rule, a description or a list of books), add and remove books, rename, delete, and merge two or more shelves into one, each with undo

0.5 — Your shelves in Claude

planned

Needs Model Hub 1.0, which brings the Hub's tool registry and its MCP server. Books & Shelves registers what it can do with the Hub and runs no server of its own.

  • Ask for a shelf in plain words, in the Hub's panel or from Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Codex: make one from a description or a rule, add and remove books, merge two shelves, rename, delete. Every change can be undone, as from the plugin's own commands
  • Your library as the agent's context: it can look a book up, list a shelf's members or read a PDF's text, so "what do I have on fermentation?" is answered from your own shelves

Exploring

Not scheduled. Research or a design comes first.

  • Audible: audiobooks beside the books you own in Calibre
  • Kindle
  • More when other plugins are present: optional layers of richer views
  • Two-way mirrors with Calibre: shelves as a Calibre column, virtual libraries
  • A full cleanup sweep, with web research for each book
  • Mobile

Not planned

So you know before you ask.

  • Personal import rules. They belong in a pack of your own.
  • Any telemetry sent to the author.

Read from ROADMAP.md in the plugin's repo.

How the plugins feed each other →