Guide

Everything HashShelf does.

Five minutes, the whole manual. The one idea underneath it all: your shelf is a link, and the link is the data.

01Add books

Type a title into the search box — it searches as you type and shows matches with covers. Pick one and the form fills itself. Set a rating (0–5), a status (want, reading, finished, did not finish), an optional note, then Add book.

You can also add directly by ISBN (the number on a book's barcode) or an Open Library work ID — useful when search can't find an obscure edition.

TIP — Adding a book that's already on the shelf updates it instead of duplicating it. Arrow keys and Enter work in the search results; Escape dismisses them.

02Shelves

You can keep several lists — a to-read pile, a finished log, a book-club list. Switch, create, rename, and delete them from the shelf bar.

The shelf's name is the title people see when you share it: the page heading, the link preview, the year-in-review card. Renaming a shelf changes its link, since the name travels inside it.

03Share a shelf

The address bar updates as you edit — that long link after the # is your shelf, compressed. Hit Create HashShelf to copy a clean short link that unfurls with a preview in iMessage, Discord, and the like.

Links are snapshots, frozen at the moment you share them. Keep editing and your copy moves on; the link you sent stays exactly as it was. Share again to send the newer version.

TIP — Your links are also your backup. Shelves live in your browser, so clearing browsing data erases them — but opening any link you saved rebuilds that shelf perfectly. Text yourself your shelf's link once in a while.

04Open someone's shelf

Following a HashShelf link shows that shelf read-only, with covers, ratings, notes, and a status filter. Two buttons matter:

Copy to my shelf — forks their list into your currently active shelf. From then on it's yours: your edits, your links, no connection back. Books you both had take their version of the rating and note.
Compare with mine — jumps straight to a comparison (see 06).

TIP — For a clean copy instead of a merge, create a new empty shelf first, then open their link and import into it.

05Import from Goodreads

On the Goodreads desktop site: My Books → Import/Export → Export Library, which downloads a CSV. Back here, hit Import Goodreads CSV and pick that file.

Your shelves map to statuses (read → finished, currently-reading → reading, to-read → want, and a custom dnf/abandoned shelf → did not finish). Star ratings and written reviews come along. Books with no ISBN in the export — usually ebooks and audiobooks — are skipped and named in the summary, so you can add those few by title search.

06Compare shelves

Compare shelves takes a friend's link (short or long) and lays out: your overlap, the books you both loved, where your ratings disagree most, and what each of you has that the other doesn't — with a one-tap add their books to my want list.

It matches books intelligently: the same title added by ISBN on one shelf and by search on the other still counts as the same book.

07Filters & genres

Filter your list by status and by genre. Genres are worked out automatically from Open Library's subject data — nothing to tag by hand, and they never bloat your links because they're looked up, not stored.

08Year in review

Year in review renders your shelf as a shareable card — cover strip, books finished, average rating, top authors and genres, and your rating spread. Download it as a PNG or send it straight to the share sheet on your phone.

09Install it & offline

HashShelf is installable: Add to Home Screen on your phone (or the install icon in a desktop browser's address bar) gives it an icon and its own window. After the first visit it works offline — your shelves are local, and previously seen covers and titles are cached.

10Buy links

Each book shows small Amazon and Audiobook links — the second searches the Audible catalog for that title. Both are affiliate links: if you buy something after clicking one, HashShelf earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's the site's entire business model, disclosed here and in the footer, and the links never carry any information about you or your shelf.

11Your data, plainly

No account exists, so there's nothing to log into and nothing to breach.
Shelves live in your browser; shared shelves live in the links themselves.
Short links store that snapshot on the server, content-addressed, tied to no one.
Everything decodes on any device, any time — the site could vanish and your links would still contain your books.

The longer version of the philosophy lives on the About page.

← Back to your shelf