Early this year I was look­ing for an online book­shelf to man­age my books. It had to be online so that I could access it at a whim from every­where. I did some research and I dis­cov­ered Shel­fari which I’ve been using for almost a year now. Since then Shel­fari has come a long way. The folks over there did an awe­some job and I’m glad to have found the site. I’m using it quite fre­quently these days – though I have yet to add all my books – and I thought it’s time to praise the service.

Shel­fari fea­tures an appeal­ing design and is very easy to use, as long as you don’t use the more sophis­ti­cated func­tions. Search­ing for books is very easy and you can do so by title, author name, or ISBN. Since they have access to Amazon’s data­base your searches only rarely come up with noth­ing. After you found a spe­cific book you can add it to your per­sonal library with a sim­ple click. Addi­tion­ally, you can pro­vide some infor­ma­tion on the book, e. g., whether you own the book or not, how much it cost you, your review, tags, and so on. Some of the addi­tional infor­ma­tion is pri­vate and only you can see it.

Your book­shelf is split in sex sec­tions, namely “I plan to read”, “I’m read­ing”, “I’ve read”, “Favorites”, “Own”, and “Wish list”. You can export and import your whole book­shelf to and from an Excel spread­sheet. Even more impor­tant, you can cre­ate and save wid­gets and use them on your web­site. These wid­gets con­tain spe­cific books or sec­tions from your library and you can con­fig­ure the appear­ance. I am using one wid­get on my library page. Now that’s a handy fea­ture and part of the rea­son I chose Shel­fari over all the others.

Unfor­tu­nately, where there’s light there is shadow. Choos­ing the right edi­tion isn’t as straight for­ward as it should be. First, you have to add the main edi­tion and only then can you add another, your own edi­tion. Next, you have to set the lat­ter one to dis­play on your shelf and only then can you remove the main edi­tion of the book. It cer­tainly isn’t a deal-breaker but there are a few of these minor issues and they can dampen your expe­ri­ence somewhat.

Nonethe­less, I like the ser­vice very much, even though they still can’t pro­vide my per­sonal rat­ing of a book in the wid­get. Well, I hope they’re going to fix that soon.