Bookshelf

Bookshelf adds a Bookshelf view type to Obsidian Bases, displaying notes as books on realistic shelves — with covers, spines, and grouping.

Use it to browse books, movies, games, courses, papers, or any collection of notes that benefits from a cover-driven layout.

Key features

  • New view type for Bases — Bookshelf sits alongside Table, Cards, and Gallery.
  • Real covers with graceful fallback — cover images from any property, or a colored spine with the title when no cover is available.
  • Multiple shelf textures — oak, walnut, cherry, mahogany, pine, ebony, brushed/dark metal, white/black marble, concrete, and slate.
  • Respects Base groupings — each groupBy group becomes its own shelf with a header and book count.
  • Property display — any property in the view’s display order appears under each book; rating properties are highlighted.
  • Clickable wikilinks[[links]] in displayed properties open via Obsidian’s standard link handling.
  • Intuitive interactions — click to open, Ctrl/Cmd+click to open in a new tab, right-click for a context menu.

Quick start

  1. Install and enable the plugin (see Usage).
  2. Open or create a .base file.
  3. Add a view and set its type to Bookshelf.
  4. In the view’s options, pick an Image property for covers.
  5. Add any properties you want shown under each book to the Base’s display order.

About

Created by Sébastien Dubois.

Support the plugin: Buy me a coffee ❤️ · Follow on X.

My other Obsidian plugins

Plugin What it does
Agentic Resource Discovery Server Local-first Agentic Resource Discovery publisher and registry that serves your AI skills and tools to agents over a local HTTP and MCP server
Book Exporter Export books (one manifest note + linked chapter notes) to EPUB and PDF via Pandoc
Dataview Serializer Serialize Dataview queries to Markdown, and keep the Markdown representation up to date
Expander Replace variables across your vault using HTML comment markers. Supports static values and dynamic functions
Ghost Publish Publish your vault notes to a Ghost blog with configurable presets for tags, newsletters, and frontmatter conventions
Graph Explorer Base View A custom Bases view that renders notes as an interactive force-directed graph with explored/unexplored tracking
Hidden Folders Access Index hidden root-level folders (e.g. .claude) so they appear in the file tree, metadata cache, and Bases
Journal Bases Custom Base views for journaling and periodic reviews
Kanban Action Planner Render your notes as configurable Kanban boards and calendars inside Bases, with statuses, ordering, relationships, and scheduling
Life Tracker Capture and visualize the data that matters in your life
Note Village A 2D pixel art village where your notes become villagers you can explore and chat with using AI
Obsidian Starter Kit Adds strong typing support and powerful automation support for notes
Remarkable Synchronizer Connect to the reMarkable cloud, list, download, and sync notebook pages as images
Replicate Use AI models with ease via the Replicate.com integration
REST and MCP server Exposes CLI commands as RESTful API endpoints and an MCP server for AI tool integration
Time Machine Browse, compare, and restore previous versions of your notes using built-in file-recovery snapshots
Transcriber Transcribe images to markdown using Ollama vision models
Typefully Publish social media posts with ease using the Typefully integration
Update Time Automatically update front matter to include creation and last update times

Everything I build is documented in my newsletter and on my YouTube channel.

News & support

To stay up to date about this plugin, Obsidian in general, Personal Knowledge Management and note-taking:

If this plugin is useful to you, here are the best ways to support my work ❤️: