How to Create a BookShelf To Track Books in Obsidian

The easy setup guide using the dataview plugin

Prakash Joshi Pax
5 min readMay 17, 2022

Previously I used to track books using Notion. But once I moved to obsidian, I wanted to make something similar on obsidian so that I don’t have to go back and forth between Obsidian and Notion.

Since, I keep all of my book notes in obsidian, having a book tracker and the reading list inside of obsidian itself is much more helpful to create a frictionless workflow.

With the help of the dataview plugin, it was possible to create a reading list and book tracker in obsidian. In this article, I will explain step-by-step how to create a reading list and track books in obsidian.

Tracking books in obsidian
Book Tracker in Obsidian

Plugins we’ll need: Dataview, Book Search

Step 1: Install Book Search Plugin

This is not mandatory, but using this plugin helps to auto-populate the data field of books. Go to community plugins, install it and then enable it.

Click on hotkeys and assign a hotkey preferable to you. I’ve used Alt+B.

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Prakash Joshi Pax
Prakash Joshi Pax

Written by Prakash Joshi Pax

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