The problem
Every book cataloging app on earth was built by someone who thinks a book is a title, an author, and a cover image.
This is like saying a house is a door.
If you collect antiquarian or rare books, you already know the problem. You've tried the apps. You've scanned the barcode on a book that doesn't have a barcode, because it was printed in 1847. You've searched for your Elzevir and been offered a self-help paperback. You've stared at a “Condition” dropdown with four options — Good, Very Good, Fine, Poor — and thought: where do I put “foxing to prelims, spine lightly sunned, hinges starting, previous owner apparently used a rasher of bacon as a bookmark”?
You've tried Excel. We've all tried Excel. Excel is where bibliographic ambition goes to die, one auto-corrected date at a time.
The solution
or: what happens when a collector snaps
Shelvd was built in Belgium by someone who owns twenty-eight thousand books and finally ran out of patience with all of the above.
28,000
That's not a collection, that's a logistical situation. It's the kind of number that makes removal firms send two quotes: one for the books, one for the therapy.
It's enough books to insulate a house, and enough metadata to crash a spreadsheet — which it did, on a Sunday afternoon, somewhere around row 2,300, when a VLOOKUP formula achieved sentience and chose death over another entry.
The existing tools couldn't handle it. Not the depth, not the scale, not the very reasonable expectation that software for book collectors should know what an octavo is.
So we built one that does.
What we actually care about
Bibliographic precision
76 book formats. 45 cover types. 65 bindings. Separate condition fields for text block and dust jacket. If you need to record that the marbled endpapers have been replaced and the gilt lettering on the spine is rubbed, this is your place. If you don't know what any of that means, this is probably not.
Provenance
Not a text field. A proper timeline. Monastery to aristocrat to auction house to that dealer at the Brussels book fair who swore it was a first state dust jacket, and who are we to argue in the rain.
Your data, not ours
Full export, anytime, in every format we can think of. No lock-in. We built this because we needed it, not because we wanted to hold your collection hostage.
Design that respects your intelligence
Swiss typography. No rounded corners. No confetti animations when you add a book. Software for adults who own books published before the invention of the ISBN.
What we are
A one-person operation from Mechelen, Belgium. No venture capital. No Series A. No ping-pong table. Just an unhealthy relationship with books and an unreasonable attention to detail.
The company is called Simplinity, which is either a clever portmanteau or a pretentious one. Jury's still out.
What we are not
A social network. A reading tracker. A place to rate books with stars, as though a 1623 Shakespeare Folio and a beach thriller operate on the same five-point scale.
Goodreads tracks what you've read. Shelvd catalogs what you own.
If you don't see the difference, we can't help you. But we suspect you do, because you're still reading.
The name
“Shelvd” is missing an ‘e’. We removed it because brevity is a virtue, every good editor knows when to cut, and the domain with the ‘e’ was taken. Two out of three ain't bad.
Built in Belgium. Powered by coffee, stubbornness, and the quiet conviction that your books deserve better than a spreadsheet.