What is this about, anyway?

Bookshelves.dev is a space for trying out new ideas for encountering books online.

In bookstores, I almost always encounter the books I didn't even know I wanted to read. But that almost never happens on bookstore websites. Why?

Booksellers are people who facilitate encounters with books. You find the ones you knew you wanted you wanted when you walked in, yes, but also ones you didn't know you wanted. This is because they created that environment, and it can feel magical.

The recommendation from booksellers—perhaps conveyed in a conversation from across the counter or captured in a shelftalker but always and foremost embodied in the selection of books on the shelves—is the explanation for the magic.

But this careful shaping of the experience through curation and presentation is just not hard to translate well to bookstores' online incarnations. It is lost in search boxes, or disappears while scrolling through pages of product links and marketing copy, or scared away by the feeling that the principal curator is an algorithm.

A bookstore is not a collection of books for sale. A bookstore is: booksellers plus space. What could this mean when extended to the online space? Boy do I have opinions.

This project is primarily a learning exercise, though I really hope some other folks will find it useful.

If you want to know a little bit more:

I want to explore how we might build a way of encountering books online that honors the idea of a bookstore? A new landscape of apps, frameworks, and APIs offers an opportunity to imagine something new. The pandemic-catalyzed reliance on online shopping is not going away. A better world is possible if we build it together. To learn a little bit more, maybe start with my post about what to expect on this site or how it is meant to work. I really want to create an experience that truly complements and strengthen the physical presence of bookstores that I love. If not, I know that there are some interesting things to learn and interesting people to and learn from along the way.

Some other things to note.