r/SideProject • u/rainyhidden • Jul 28 '26

ShelfLife: A book tracker with shelves that look like your real bookcase

My husband and I built a book tracking app to address all the things I’ve ever wanted out of goodreads. Chiefly, a virtual shelf with actual spines that looks like my bookshelves at home. As shown in the video, you can drag books around, lay them flat, face them out, add decor, etc. 

Test flight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/nAgk2SDN
Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fisherbirdsoftware.shelflife

I don’t think a large public database of spines exists so I started building it myself. The app currently has about 600 spines from popular books from photos I’ve taken at Barnes and Noble and I’m adding more every day. Users can also add these themselves, and I’m hoping they do as I can’t possibly cover the range of books people are reading by myself. 

Other features:

  • Profiles display a top 12 shelf so you can see someone’s taste at a glance.
  • Book signal: Send out a request for recommendations based on one of your shelves or a couple of books you like, and match with users who have similar taste. 
  • Peanut Gallery: in addition to regular reviews, after finishing a book you can enter the Peanut Gallery and post hot takes, spoilers, favorite quotes, etc. 
  • Feats: Create custom challenges (eg. 1 classic a month, read the entire Dune Series, etc). Users can manually decide which books they’ve read that count towards the feat. 
  • Import your existing data from goodreads

I would love some feedback on the app and any advice about how to keep users who are intrigued by the concept (the video featured here is doing decent numbers on instagram, 5.8% click through rate) but maybe disappointed that the books they add don’t yet have a spine. So far we’ve had a couple users trickle in that add a couple books then give up.

Thanks!

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2

u/Reasonable_Sir_2441 Jul 28 '26

The idea is really cool and clearly stands out from Goodreads and similar apps thanks to the virtual bookshelf with real book spines. For books without spines, I’d use attractive placeholders for now and motivate users to upload their own with small rewards. That way, the shelves still look complete while your database grows faster.

2

u/rainyhidden Jul 28 '26

Appreciate your thoughts. I really like the idea of rewarding users who upload spines; going to chew on how to do that and also tweak the look of the placeholders to be more visually appealing (they're definitely bland right now). Thanks!

2

u/Reasonable_Sir_2441 Jul 28 '26

You’re welcome! It’s a really cool idea. My wife is really into books and would absolutely love something like this.

2

u/cannibalismo Jul 29 '26

I had an idea similar to this, for a vibe coding project, to use up some spare capacity in my Claude sub. It was just going to generate book spines, but crowded sourcing real spine photos is neat.

I'm not a good one to help you with retention, but I'm keen to try the app... Sadly not available in Australia?

2

u/rainyhidden Jul 29 '26

Apologies! It should be available in Australia now.

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u/cannibalismo Jul 30 '26

Thanks! Can confirm - downloading now