Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks

github.com

263 pointsmawise57 comments

Nice! Many, many years ago, when Shelfie was shutting down, I was imagining we might want VR bookshelves one day, and I convinced Brewster to store Sheflie's spine and cover images over at the archive. Might be worth reaching out to see if they still have them. Spine images are a little hard to get; they're not part of the Amazon API, for instance.

Not a bookshelf, but it reminds me of something that Stripe did something similar here which is equally as cool.

https://press.stripe.com/

Something very similar was done a while ago by Petar Gyurov:

https://petargyurov.com/bookshelf/

Thanks for the shout out!

2022 / Spin has no cover

*Had I guess CTRL+F5 Fixed it

Thanks, yeah I currently just hardcode the image URL from whatever cover I find online. Maybe you had an old version cached or the image just failed to load for whatever reason.

I need to update my bookshelf really, I haven't bothered to do so since 2023!

Very cool! I love the animation. I worked on a similar interface inspired a while back for Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/explore . You have to go to "Settings > Book style > 3d-spine" to enable the effect

Super cool - reminds me of the Stripe press website https://press.stripe.com/

I do not own many leather-bound books, nor does my apartment smell of rich mahogony, but this gave me a wonderful idea for visualising what my many ebooks might look like through an AR or VR virtual library experience.

This is awesome!

If we want to extend this to be a whole virtual library, are there datasets that people know about for book covers?

One thing that would be cool is book spine datasets!

Open library has covers/metadata; alas no spines! I built an interface similar to this for Open Library using library classifications for sorting: https://openlibrary.org/explore

Most ebooks have embedded cover images that Calibre will automatically extract. I know of https://isbndb.com/ which has covers of some resolution but I've never tried using them before.

Good q! Check my other comment here about spine images.

Looks great! One thing to consider would be adding some more specular lighting. Books in real life are shiny, and the render looks a bit flat.

Looks great. Though while I love me some skeuomorphism, it goes too far when it is plainly detrimental to usability, which it is here - I have to crane my neck sideways to read the titles. In a virtual world, the books could be stacked horizontally so that the titles are readable with user head upright.

You just… built exactly the thing I was working on. Except it looks better.

I’ve had this before, but I figured this project would be small and niche enough that it‘d never happen. Crazy shit.

Ditto

I've wanted something like this so that I can have a custom bookshelf behind me in teams calls. I was tempted to make one but had no clue where to find book spine artwork.

Digitizing spines is a lot less labor intensive than bookscanning; getting photos of spines is basically just taking photos of shelves, so maybe just go to the library and spend about 5 minutes taking photos.

Maybe you'd also be interested in the Kindle Flare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDBzQkWeQ5g

I love it!

I read almost exclusively on Kindle, and one of the downsides of an e-book library is that it's not really browsable by your friends and family when they come over. I've long envisioned a movie poster-sized touch screen that shows my library almost exactly like this, so people can touch it, scroll through my library, and interact with books (ie, animate it sliding out and displaying the cover + description). When it's not interacted with, it just looks like a painting on the wall.

I have zero idea how to pull this off, but I'd love to do it, and this visualization of the shelf is exactly what I had in mind!

Amazing job. I'm very impressed!

I can imagine this being used to design a better Goodreads UX where you can see your friends' libraries. Super cool!

The thickness of the book being calculated from its page count is a really nice touch.

Very cool!

I've wanted to build something similar to this for music. Some virtual environment where you can organize your albums on shelves and play them on a turntable.

You could even extend this so you have to walk to a store to buy new albums etc.

I can't remember the name, unfortunately, but a year ago, I saw a oculus quest VR environment which re-created a standard 90s era bedroom. The user could then add a text file containing a bunch of YouTube URLs and all the associated YouTube videos got represented as physical VHS tapes that you had to put into the actual VCR in order to play them on the TV in the room.

Sansar had that years ago. They re-created Aech's basement from Ready Player One, with walls of tapes in various formats.[1] This could be explored in VR. It was good for a few minutes of amusement, but not useful. They didn't have the rights to let you play much of the collection.

There's a business in Second Life which has virtual video stores, where all the videos are in boxes on shelves. You can walk around, look at the titles, rent them, and play them on your virtual TV. Have friends over to your virtual house and you all see the same thing. They have some rights deal which lets them do this for a few hundred videos. The selection is comparable to what Redbox stocked. This was big during COVID lockdown; not so much now.

[1] https://atlas.sansar.com/experiences/sansar-studios/ready-pl...

Most probably EmuVR.

You also get to play NES and some other systems on a variety of old virtual TVs. :)

This is a version of a book you can see in WebXR and there are examples on his YouTube of flipping through pages to read [1]

Also an interesting new template project in ThreeJS/React R3F [2]

[1] https://zachernuk.neocities.org/autobook/

[2] https://x.com/wawasensei/status/1817118226545053706

Great. Back when quirky.com was a product idea site, I proposed a piece of furniture that would be a bookshelf for ebooks (large e-ink screen cabinet).

Nicely done. Years ago I had the idea of projecting my Kindle library onto the wall to look like a bookshelf. Stopped at the idea stage.

Very nice! It's a shame that Calibre doesn't have pics of the book spines to work with on something like this.

Nice idea and implementation, would love to see a live demo without having to install this on my machine.

Very nice. I can imagine a publisher website using something like this to promote their books.

Some already do.

https://press.stripe.com/

This is too cool. Thanks for sharing.

Here is a tip to attract users: Add screenshot(s) showing how your bookshelf looks like.

I miss all the cool animations and loving touches like this in Apple’s iBooks.

Looks nice! What is the license for this project – I can't find it on the project?

Thanks!

Good call, I've added an MIT license to the project.

Digital Bookshelf screensavers for streaming boxes would be cool.

Brandon Sanderson ftw!

Went to comments here exactly for this. I was delighted to see one of my favorite authors front-and-center as an incidental detail of an otherwise unrelated tech. demo.

Is there a live demo or do we have to clone it to see it?

If it doesn't show for you in the README (it didn't for me at first), just click on demo.gif

I wish Plex included something like this

i would love if someone could create the same for the ps3 emulator games which run on emulator on my pc.

Looks: nice

Usability: useless

It’s only useless if you limit yourself to flatscreen technology. This is definitely useful for AR VR

You could say the same about a physical library, yet most people wouldn't prefer a library of uniform books with 'boring' uniform spines.

This is not an argument, just a thought.

How are the books sorted?

Right now books are sorted by author name (eek, I think first name--calibre has an author_sort field I should use), then series name, then series index.

Pretty cool!

Reminds me of Microsoft Bob

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