A book tracker that refuses to know you.

HashShelf keeps your reading list — what you've finished, what you're reading, what you rated it — and turns the whole thing into a single link. Send that link to a friend and they see your shelf. That's the entire product.

The idea

Every book site wants the same three things before you can write down a title: an account, an email, a feed to keep you scrolling. That always seemed backwards. A reading list is closer to a scrap of paper than a social profile — you should be able to hand it to someone the way you'd hand over a note.

So HashShelf stores your shelf in the link itself. The letters after the # in a HashShelf URL aren't a lookup code for a record about you on a server somewhere — they are your books, compressed and checksummed. Decode them and the shelf comes back, byte for byte, on any device, forever. If HashShelf-the-website vanished tomorrow, every link ever shared would still contain every book it ever held.

The rules

• 01No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to be locked out of.
• 02No feed. Your shelf is shown to people you hand it to, and no one else.
• 03No analytics scripts, no ad pixels, no tracking. The page you load is the page there is.
• 04The link is the data. Our server keeps only a cache of public book facts and copies of shelves people chose to shorten — none of it tied to a person.
• 05The buy links next to books are affiliate links, and they're disclosed. That's the entire business model — no exceptions, and never your data, because we don't have any.

Who's behind it

"Us" is, in the grand tradition of the small web, mostly one person with a reading pile that outruns their finishing speed. HashShelf is a side project made with care, run on modest hardware, and kept deliberately small — the features it grows (importing your Goodreads library, comparing shelves with a friend, a year-in-review card) all have to pass the same test: does it work without knowing who you are?

Sources & thanks

Titles, authors, covers, and subjects come from Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archive building a catalog of every book ever published. HashShelf caches politely, credits gladly, and encourages you to support them.

Every line of the code is public on GitHub to audit — corrections and ideas welcome there. If a book hydrates wrong, it's almost always the upstream record — give it a day and try again.