Bookshelf Base

Bookshelf Base

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 groupBy configuration. 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)

1. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins.
2. Disable Restricted mode if it's enabled.
3. 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):

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <Vault>/.obsidian/plugins/bookshelf-base/.
3. 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.

1. Install Obsidian42 - BRAT from Settings → Community plugins → Browse and enable it.
2. Run BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing from the command palette.
3. Paste https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-bookshelf.
4. Select the latest version and confirm.
5. Enable Bookshelf in Settings → Community plugins.

Quick start

1. Create or open a Base (.base file).
2. Add a view and select Bookshelf as its type.
3. In the view's options, set Image property to the frontmatter property holding your cover images (e.g. cover).
4. Add any properties you want to show under each book to the view's display order.
5. Optionally set groupBy on 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.

• Usage
• Configuration
• Tips & best practices
• Release notes

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.

Quick commands:

License

MIT © Sébastien Dubois

My other Obsidian plugins

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.