Websites I Love: Bookshelf Town

I’ve been wanting to make a blog for a while but the minute I finished building the site I got shy and didn’t know what to post so this is me trying to rip the band-aid off with a series: sharing websites I love.

Today’s website is: Bookshelf Town

I like reading but I’ve often found it difficult to stick to a method/app to track what I’ve read and enjoyed. It hasn’t really bothered me but every now and then when books come up in conversation or I’m trying to remember a quote or scene to reference, I have a hard time remembering the specifics and wish I’d wrote it down somewhere.

I also can’t deny that there’s a sense of pride in seeing my list of finished reads grow—that’s what’s initially inspired me to keep a record. But whether it’s with Goodreads or just plain pen and paper, I end up getting annoyed/bored and calling it quits before I can barely jot down 10 books. With Goodreads specifically, the process of recording and reviewing felt performative in a way (as it does with any social media app) and I couldn’t help but be conscious of it. Also, I remember the UI in general just seemed dated and clunky from when I was using it (it was a couple years back but it looks like not much has changed).

All this to say, I was working on making a personal app to track and record my reading progress when I came across Bookshelf Town.

It has an endearingly simplistic yet clever design with the homepage being a book itself with bookmark-shaped tabs to navigate the site. Signing up is easy, and your personal page is split into columns of books you’ve added, organized in the typical “To Read,” “Reading,” and “Read,” except each list is formatted to appear as a stack of book spines with the titles facing the viewer. I love that you can customize with different color themes (my favorite is ‘tulip’), filter through books, and archive the ones you don’t immediately want to view.

It’s clean, concise, and gives you everything you need to start documenting your reads. I also didn’t realize it until I started adding books myself, but I do appreciate the decision to exclude book covers (no matter how much I love looking at them individually), mainly because it prevents me from getting distracted or overwhelmed when scrolling through my or other people’s lists.

I do have some issues with the site, one of them being that currently, I can only see the books I’ve finished for the single year that I’ve specified in my settings with no option to see all the books I’ve completed regardless of the year. It’s not a necessary function, but it would be nice to add. Also, when adding a book, you’re searching through their database of books already populated by other readers, which isn’t a problem except that there’s no standard for naming titles or authors and no method for validating input, so you get results like this:

Overall, though, it’s a great alternative to many of the other reading apps and tools out there. It’s still in progress, so I can’t wait to see what else they add, and I’ll definitely be using it in the meantime. If you like reading or are looking to get into it, I hope you give it a try!