Questions and answers
What Stacks is, what it isn't, and how the lending works.
The idea
- What is Stacks?
- A lending library for the books you own. You list the books on your shelf, your friends list theirs, and you borrow from each other. Each book page knows where that copy is, who has had it, and what the people who read it thought.
- How is it different from Goodreads or StoryGraph?
Those are for tracking your reading: what you've read, how you rated it, what to read next. Stacks is about the physical copies and the people around you. The unit isn't “a book” but “your copy of it”, and the point is to get it into a friend's hands.
So there are no star ratings, no reviews of books in general, no recommendation engine and no public profiles. Notes stay with the copy as it passes between friends, like a pencilled line inside the cover. If you already keep a list on Goodreads or StoryGraph, you can import it and carry on using both. There's a fuller comparison too.
- Do I have to lend my books out?
- No. Every request comes to you and you can decline it. Plenty of people use Stacks as a catalogue of what they own and borrow from friends without lending much themselves.
- Does it cost anything?
- No. Stacks is free and open source. Book details and covers come from Open Library, the Internet Archive's catalogue.
Borrowing and lending
- How does borrowing work?
- Search for a book and you'll see which friends have it. Ask to borrow it; the owner gets a notification and lends it to you with a due date (four weeks by default). You'll both see it on your home page, with reminders as the date gets close. When you hand it back, either of you marks it returned. Owners can also hand a book straight to a friend without being asked.
- What if someone else has the book I want?
- Get in line. When the book comes back, Stacks asks the owner on your behalf and lets you know. Lines are first come, first served.
- What do my friends see?
- Your shelf: every book you own, whether it's in or out, and the notes on each copy. Nobody else sees anything unless you make a share link, which gives you a public page to send to anyone. Your want-to-read list and email settings are yours alone.
- Can I add books I don't own?
- Not to your shelf, since a friend might ask to borrow it. Put them on your want-to-read list instead: Stacks tells you when a friend has one and lets you ask for it.
Notes and reading
- What's a reader note?
- A heart, or a line or two, left on a copy by someone who has read it. Only readers of that copy can leave one: the owner, whoever's borrowing it, and anyone who has borrowed it before. Notes stay with the copy, so the next reader finds them.
- Can I keep track of what I've read?
- Yes, for your own shelf: mark a book read on its page, and filter your library by read and not read. It's personal, so two people sharing a shelf each have their own marks.
Getting books in
- What's the fastest way to add a lot of books?
- On a phone, open Search and tap Scan: point the camera at each barcode and the books add themselves. If you already keep a list on Goodreads or StoryGraph, import their export file and choose what goes on your shelf and what goes on your want-to-read list.
- A book has the wrong cover or details. Can I fix it?
- Yes. On the book page, Edit details or cover lets you change anything, pick another cover from Open Library, or refresh the details from there.
Something missing? Send feedback, or find the code and an issue tracker on GitHub.