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:

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.