Bookshelf Base
Sébastien Dubois914 downloadsDisplay your notes as a visual bookshelf via a custom Bases view.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates14
A community plugin that adds a Bookshelf view type to Obsidian Bases, letting you display notes as a visual bookshelf — with real book covers on realistic shelves.
Perfect for tracking books, movies, games, courses, papers, or any collection of notes where a visual, cover-driven layout beats a table or card grid.
Features
- Bookshelf view for Bases — register a new view type alongside Table, Cards, and Gallery.
- Cover-driven layout — pick any property containing an image URL or vault path. Supports external URLs,
data:URIs, and vault-relative paths. - Automatic spines — notes without a cover get a colored spine with a vertical title, generated deterministically from the title so each book keeps its identity.
- Shelf textures — choose from oak, walnut, cherry, mahogany, pine, ebony, brushed metal, dark metal, white marble, black marble, concrete, and slate.
- Grouping — respects the Base's
groupByconfiguration. Each group becomes its own shelf with a header and count. - Property display — any property added to the Base's display order appears under each book. Rating properties are highlighted.
- Wikilink rendering —
[[links]]inside displayed properties are clickable and routed through Obsidian's standard link handling. - Interactions — click a cover to open the note, Ctrl/Cmd+click to open in a new tab, right-click for a context menu (open, open in new tab, reveal in navigation).
- Adjustable layout — tune card size, gap between books, and aspect ratio directly from the view's options.
- Desktop & mobile — no desktop-only APIs.
- What's new after updates. After a plugin update, a one-time dialog shows the release notes you just received (including skipped versions) with ways to support development. Never shown on fresh installs or regular restarts.
Requirements
- Obsidian 1.4.0 or newer.
- The Bases feature enabled (core plugin).
Installation
Community plugins (recommended)
- In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins.
- Disable Restricted mode if it's enabled.
- Select Browse, search for Bookshelf, install it, then enable it.
You can also browse the catalog on the Obsidian Community website.
Manual installation
If the plugin isn't listed in the community catalog yet (or you want a specific version):
- Download
main.js,manifest.json, andstyles.cssfrom the latest release. - Copy them into
<Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/bookshelf-base/. - Reload Obsidian and enable Bookshelf in Settings → Community plugins.
BRAT (bleeding edge)
BRAT (Beta Reviewers Auto-update Tool) installs plugins straight from a GitHub repo and keeps them updated automatically. Use this if you want the latest commits — things might break.
- Install Obsidian42 - BRAT from Settings → Community plugins → Browse and enable it.
- Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing from the command palette.
- Paste
https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-bookshelf. - Select the latest version and confirm.
- Enable Bookshelf in Settings → Community plugins.
Quick start
- Create or open a Base (
.basefile). - Add a view and select Bookshelf as its type.
- In the view's options, set Image property to the frontmatter property holding your cover images (e.g.
cover). - Add any properties you want to show under each book to the view's display order.
- Optionally set
groupByon the Base to split books across multiple shelves.
A minimal note that works out of the box:
---
title: The Pragmatic Programmer
author: '[[David Thomas]]'
cover: https://example.com/pragmatic.jpg
rating: 5
---
Documentation
Full documentation lives in docs/ and is published at https://dsebastien.github.io/obsidian-bookshelf.
Development
See DEVELOPMENT.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.
Quick commands:
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
bun install |
Install dependencies |
bun run dev |
Development build with watch mode |
bun run build |
Production build |
bun run tsc:watch |
Type check in watch mode |
bun run lint |
Run ESLint |
bun run format |
Format with Prettier |
bun test |
Run tests |
License
MIT © Sébastien Dubois
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:
- Subscribe to my newsletter
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
- Join the Knowii community and learn to organize your notes and put your knowledge to work, together with fellow knowledge workers
If this plugin is useful to you, here are the best ways to support my work ❤️:
- Join the Knowii community
- Become a GitHub Sponsor
- Buy me a coffee
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
- Check out my products
Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue.
HealthExcellent
ReviewCaution
About
Display notes as a visual bookshelf in Bases with real covers on realistic shelves, turning each Base group into its own shelf with headers and counts. Pick cover images from external URLs, data URIs, or vault-relative paths; auto-generate deterministic colored spines for coverless notes and render wikilinks in properties. Choose from multiple shelf textures, adjust card size, gap and aspect ratio, and open notes via click, Ctrl/Cmd+click or right-click; works on desktop and mobile.Details
Current version
0.6.0
Last updated
7 days ago
Created
6 months ago
Updates
14 releases
Downloads
914
Compatible with
Obsidian 1.10.0+
Platforms
Desktop, Mobile
License
MIT