TomeShelf

Your personal library, beautifully organized.

TomeShelf helps you identify books quickly, keep your shelves organized, capture the right level of metadata for each copy, and build a library that stays useful across devices.

Features

📷

Identify One Book

Use a barcode, ISBN, or up to 3 photos of the cover, title page, and copyright page. TomeShelf can do a fast Quick Add or a more exact Specific Edition lookup.

📸

Bulk Load

Add books from a bookshelf photo, a batch of individual book photos, or a text list. Review matches before anything is added.

📖

Shelves

Organize your catalog into named shelves, move books in bulk, and keep separate collections without losing one searchable library.

🖉

Metadata Refresh

Already added a book? Re-run lookup from saved photos, the current cover, new photos, ISBN, or manual search to improve title, author, edition, and year details without re-adding it.

🔎

Research Briefings

Rich background briefings are generated automatically for your books, with spoiler-safe handling for fiction and on-demand regeneration when needed.

🎧

Audio Briefings

Listen to a narrated version of any briefing on demand, with multiple voice options. Fiction titles can offer both spoiler-safe and spoiler-inclusive audio versions.

🖼

Covers and Photos

Keep your own cover photo, search online, replace covers from camera or upload, and save additional pages or condition photos with each record.

🔗

Share Books and Shelves

Generate read-only links for shelves or individual books. Control whether notes, additional photos, Wikipedia lookup, and audio are included.

☁

Cloud Sync

Your catalog, photos, and briefings stay in sync across devices. Guest mode lets you try everything before linking to Google.

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Everything TomeShelf can do.

Adding Books

Barcode scanning — scan ISBN barcodes with your phone camera; falls back to html5-qrcode on browsers without native BarcodeDetector support
Photo Book Lookup — identify one book from up to 3 images; best results come from cover, title page, and copyright/publisher page; users can mark which selected image is the cover
Quick Add vs. Specific Edition — Quick Add focuses on work-level metadata, while Specific Edition keeps edition detail evidence-first and can use page extraction plus Perplexity for non-ISBN photo flows
Alternate candidates — when multiple candidates are found, all are shown with cover thumbnails; selecting an alternate candidate swaps it to the top while keeping the previous pick accessible
Bulk Load: Bookshelf Photo — photograph a shelf or group of books; AI reads visible spines and covers; review a ✓/✗ list before anything is added, with year saved when evidence is strong enough
Bulk Load: Batch Photos — select up to 20 individual book photos at once; each image is treated as one book; alternate candidates and cover choices are shown per item, with fuller correction review when edition evidence is weak
Bulk Load: Titles in Text — extract books from a photographed list or pasted text and review them before adding
Search Results — cover thumbnails appear inline in search results; “Try Broader Search” relaxes query constraints when initial matches are poor; each candidate shows a plain-language match cue
Metadata Refresh — existing books can rerun lookup from saved photos, the current cover, new photos, ISBN, or manual search without creating a duplicate record; external cover URLs can be used for analysis without being imported into local storage

Managing Your Library

Shelves — organize books into multiple named shelves; create, rename, and delete shelves; last-viewed shelf restored on next open
Multi-book selection — select any or all books on a shelf; move the selection to another shelf or delete in bulk with confirmation; deleted books can be immediately restored via an Undo button in the confirmation toast
Full catalog fields — title, author, year, publisher, edition, ISBN, subjects, cover art, additional photos, condition, shelf location, reading status, dates, rating, and notes
Search, sort & filter — search by any field; filter by reading status, condition, or shelf; sort by title, author, year, rating, or recently added
Duplicate detection — adding a book with the same title and author as an existing entry shows a warning with an “Add Anyway” option, allowing legitimate multiple editions
Book photos — save additional photos such as inscriptions, title pages, copyright pages, illustrations, spine shots, or condition images alongside the book record
Cover replacement — replace a cover from camera, upload, or online search; preview results in the lightbox before choosing one

AI Research Briefings

Generated automatically in the background as you add books — no manual action needed; briefings appear in real time
Small batches (≤ 25 books) generate immediately via a Firestore trigger; larger batches are queued for a scheduled function that runs every 2 hours
All briefings use Perplexity Sonar Pro with web-grounded verification and structured output
Supports three genre modes: fiction (spoiler-free by default — plot/characters/analysis/discussion questions), non-fiction (themes/key concepts/analysis/takeaways), and reference (editorial approach/contents overview/production notes/notable features/ideal-for)
The Regenerate button appears when a book’s existing briefing was generated by an older or less appropriate model, and also after metadata refresh changes title or author
Daily generation limit: 100 briefings per day, with admin override

Audio Briefings

Generate a narrated audio version of any briefing on demand
Gemini 2.5 Pro writes a natural-language narration script from the briefing content; Gemini 2.5 Pro TTS synthesizes it to speech and stores a WAV file in Firebase Storage
Long scripts are automatically split into chunks for synthesis and concatenated into a single WAV; duration is calculated from the actual WAV header
When Gemini 2.5 Pro TTS hits its daily rate limit, synthesis automatically falls back to Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS for the rest of the day. A notice appears when lower-quality audio was used, with a “Regenerate Higher Quality Audio” button once Pro TTS is available again
After queuing audio, the app polls for completion and updates the panel automatically when ready
Three voice options: Kore, Puck, Charon
Fiction titles produce separate safe and spoiler-inclusive audio variants; spoiler audio requires confirmation before generating
Audio metadata (voice, duration, status, TTS model used) is stored per book; the listen button appears automatically once audio is ready

Wikipedia Lookup

Available on every book’s detail page — one tap opens an in-app modal showing the article summary, thumbnail, and Wikidata description
Pass A — direct Wikipedia REST lookup verified against the book type and author name; fast, no AI cost
Pass B — if Pass A finds nothing, a Gemini Cloud Function identifies the exact Wikipedia article title for the book and author
Shows the book’s article when one exists; falls back to the author’s article with a notice; offers a “Search Wikipedia” link if neither is found
Pass B is opt-in when sharing — shelf owners choose whether viewers can trigger AI Wikipedia lookup

Sharing

Generate a public, read-only share link for any shelf or any individual book — viewers need no account or sign-in
One active link per shelf and one active link per book; any number of people can use the same link simultaneously
Per-share controls: include personal notes (off by default), enable AI-powered Wikipedia lookup for viewers, enable audio briefings for viewers, and for single-book shares choose whether additional photos are included
Shelf shares let viewers browse the shelf and open book details; single-book shares open directly to that book’s briefing page
Viewers can browse books, read briefings, view Wikipedia articles, and play shared audio — but cannot edit, add, or remove anything
Revoke links from the shelf’s Share button, the book detail Share Book button, or from Account Settings at any time
Account Settings separates active links into Shared Shelves and Shared Books for easier management
The shared detail panel has an expand toggle for a wider reading view; state persists
Cover lightbox automatically attempts a higher-resolution Google Books image before falling back to the original

Reading Tracker

Log reading status: Want to Read, Currently Reading, Read, Did Not Finish
Record start and finish dates, star ratings (1–5), and personal notes separate from publisher notes
Filter and sort your catalog by reading status at any time

Import & Export

Export — full backup ZIP (catalog + covers), JSON, or CSV
Import — ZIP, JSON, this app’s CSV, or a Goodreads export CSV
Goodreads and backup imports are automatically enriched from Open Library and Google Books when metadata or covers are available

Cloud & Account

Catalog and briefing cache are stored in Cloud Firestore, isolated per account, with real-time sync
Cover images and additional book photos are stored separately from the catalog data in Firebase Storage and per-book photo documents
Background-generated briefings appear automatically without a page reload
Guest Mode — full functionality without signing in; books are saved to Firestore under an anonymous account; sign in with Google at any time to permanently link the library to your account
Account Settings — export a full backup ZIP (catalog JSON + all cover images) or permanently delete your account and all associated data; the Backups section shows job history with download links for completed exports
Active shelf selection and sort preferences remembered across sessions

Design & Layout

Desktop layout — three-column layout with a collapsible Add panel and an expandable Briefing panel; states persist across sessions; compact UI mode hides helper text for a denser view
Mobile-first — bottom navigation bar on phones, hardware back-button support, and safe-area insets for iPhone home bar and other notched phones
Vintage design — parchment-toned palette with Playfair Display, EB Garamond, and Courier Prime typefaces
No installation required — runs in any modern browser; no app download, no extensions

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Add Photos

Photo Details

Shelves

Share Shelf

Account Settings

Administrative Access

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