Hi everyone! Alex here from ShelfLife (my wife Macy and I started Fisherbird Software to build this). What inspired it: we have a lot of books and not a lot of apartment. Plenty of what we've read is on an e-reader, went back to the library, or got passed along to a used bookstore, and every book tracking app we tried turned all of that into a list of titles with a star rating next to it. What we actually wanted was the shelf. The one where you can see the spines, the stacks are a little too tall, and it's organized by whatever loose logic made sense that week. So the first thing we built was a visual bookshelf you arrange yourself, and everything else grew out from there. We felt that other book tracking apps didn't seem interested in copying that warm feeling you get looking at your own books. We wanted something fun and nice to look at, and then we wanted the social parts to be about taste rather than an algorithm: a Top 12 on every profile, Book Signal so you can ask readers with similar taste for a very specific rec, and a Peanut Gallery for the hot takes and spoilers that don't belong in a normal review. How it evolved: the shelf physics came first, because if the shelf didn't feel real nothing else mattered. Then spines. It turned out no public database of book spines existed, so we started building one ourselves with photos of our books, friends' books, family's book. We held a beta to see how people felt on TestFlight and the Play Store and ironed out bugs and got inspired to build the Explore page so everyone could browse everyone else's shelves! I think that was a turning point for the beta, as people seemed to stick around after a day or two once they could see each others' reading and leave hearts, follows, etc. Now the community has pushed the community spine count past 3,000! We went live August 10th on Android and August 12th on iOS, and it's completely free on iOS, Android, and web. We may add an optional supporter tier later, but nothing that exists today will ever be limited or paywalled. I have a software background but this was my first time doing the product and marketing side, so happy to talk about the stack, the release, or the marketing if you're a few months behind us on the same road. And I'd love feedback from anyone who tries it.

ShelfLife: Social Book Tracker

Build your visual bookshelves and track your reads

Build your visual bookshelves and track your reads