**Hi everyone! I'm the solo developer of an app called Openshelf (GPLv3), which recently hit v1.0.0, and I wanted to make it reachable to everyone.**

**Disclaimer**

First of all, Openshelf is your app. I don't gain anything more than feedback if you use it. I will never monetize anything about it, nor do I work in tech to take advantage of it in any way. I just wanted to give the open source community something back, as it has given me a lot.

**About the project**

The project was born mostly out of me being fed up with the alternatives. I own a substantial quantity of books, and I plan to expand my own library. I love reading, but categorizing books into different shelves, switching them, etc., is part of the hobby. As a digital alternative to this process, I used Goodreads for years, then switched between some small apps, and eventually landed on Bookshelf, which was my daily driver for years, I even paid for the premium subscription. But there were things I just couldn't understand, mainly that dynamic tags, which are one the main focuses of my app, were absent.

Openshelf is inspired by Bookshelf, but aspires to provide all its premium features, and much more, for free.

I was also quite fed up with the social aspect of these kinds of apps. I personally don't care what other people read, recommend, or think about a book, nor do I need any discovery feature. So the sole purpose of Openshelf is to be exactly that: a digital archive and a tracker.

**Key Features**

The app has a lot.

You can, obviously, add books with extensive properties, you can scan ISBNs or search for books. Some properties, such as notes and current page, are dynamic and can be updated on the fly. Others, such as status or dates, are automatically calculated and changed according to other properties and actions.

The main feature of the app is tags. There are three kinds: categories (for general use), imprints, and collections. Under the hood, tags are treated as such, tags with a TYPE property. Every tag field can be autocompleted for easy insertion or creation, and each type has special features: categories have color, imprints can have an image, and collections are ordered by default.

There are also shelves, which can be thought of as a permanent filter. When a custom search prompt is created, it can be saved as a shelf for easier access. The search function is quite complete, but I do want to expand it in the future, adding some kind of boolean search.

There's also a fully customizable stats page, built entirely with widgets. There are currently 14 widgets, some with different sizes and displays, and each one can be moved and changed. I plan to add more widgets in the future.

The app launches with full English and Spanish translations but much more can be added using Weblate.

**Premium Features**

"Premium." I wanted to add things that just make sense, and that some premium apps have.

*Book cover search.* You can search for covers using a four-step pipeline across the available providers.

*Export/Import features.* I know how painful it is to rebuild a whole library in another app. Openshelf launches with Goodreads and Bookshelf import/export features. There are some compromises along the way, but no key data is lost. It also has its own save/load option for backups, these save the whole database as a CSV, plus all covers in a zip file, and can be fully restored in Openshelf. If any user needs an import/export feature for another app, please let me know via a feature request on GitHub, and I'll gladly look into it, or feel free to add it yourself; contributions are welcome.

*Custom accent color and custom icon.* The app launches with a wide range of colors so it can feel as close to your phone's aesthetic as possible. Each color has its own icon, in multiple sizes, that can be applied or not, as the user wishes.

All app data is local. Covers are saved locally once fetched and automatically compressed when added, reducing the app's footprint considerably. As an example, an instance of the app with approximately 250 books, each with a cover (original photo size approx. 2-3 MB), weighs 63 MB total (42 MB for the app itself).

Books can be displayed as a list or grid; the properties shown can be toggled and reordered, and the grid size can be changed.

The Categories display uses a cloud-style layout following an algorithmic curve that can be customized.

There are also small extras, such as smart cropping, haptic feedback, and more.

**The compromises**

The biggest compromise of being a free project is the databases you can query. The project uses Open Library and Inventaire, with the option to add Google Books using a free API key. This limits the number of auto-detected books via search and cover search, but I've done my best to implement a high-quality system that works well with major European languages, mainly Spanish and English. It can even pull obscure books and covers.

The other big compromise is scanning. To keep the project fully open source, OCR and barcode scanning are handled separately, and there are limitations from Tesseract as an OCR tool compared to Google's ML Kit.

Finally, the app will only be available (from me, at least) on [Github](https://github.com/Swappppy/Openshelf) and [F-Droid](https://f-droid.org/es/packages/org.ftena.openshelf/)), at least until Google's policy changes pushed for this September are resolved. That said, the app is GPLv3, so anyone can do as they please with it. It's built in Flutter, so anyone can port it to any environment.

**The future**

I plan to expand this app as my needs grow. I have a few ideas I'd like to share.

I want to add custom sections to the page properties, including offsets and marks. Ever read a book that starts with a prologue in roman numerals and then continues the main text (starting at 0) with arabic numerals? Yeah, this is to fix that. Also, for series of books where non-first entries start on the page following the last one (e.g., book one finishes at 1001 and book two starts at 1002), and other editorial idiosyncrasies. I also want to add landmarks to the progress bar that can be set manually (chapters or whatever).

I'm pondering a calendar feature that tracks the reading progress of each book, making the dates dynamic instead of static.

I want to add "Readings" and "Copies" properties to the books.

Any ideas you may have are welcome.

**Thanks!**

Finally, I wanted to thank Weblate for hosting the app's translations, all my friends who will never read this post but helped me debug and test the app, and everyone who wants to give it a try.

Openshelf. FLOSS library archive/tracker