Coming soon

Your shelf, mapped to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

A collection-first library for science fiction and fantasy readers. Spine Scout keeps what you own — down to the printing on your shelf — alongside what you have read and what you are still hunting for, so the whole thing comes with you into the bookshop.

Start by photographing the shelves you already have. Spine Scout reads the spines a shelf at a time and matches them against the catalogue — the printing, the cover artist, the place in a series — so getting your library into the app is an afternoon with a camera instead of half a year of data entry.

Decades of volunteer bibliography

Every printing Spine Scout knows about was catalogued by someone who cared enough to record it. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is a community project: readers, collectors and librarians who have spent decades entering cover artists, pseudonyms, variant titles, publication series and the small print on the copyright page — the details that tell one printing from another, and that no commercial catalogue has ever bothered to keep.

That is the difference between knowing you own Ringworld and knowing you own the 1970 Ballantine first, with the Dean Ellis cover. Spine Scout is a faithful mirror of that work and gives it somewhere new to be useful: on a phone, in a bookshop, in front of a shelf. It exists because thousands of people did the unglamorous part first.

337,000
works
584,000
printings
301,000
authors
59,000
series
273,000
cover-art credits

Native apps for iOS and Android, offline-first, so the shelf in your pocket works in a basement bookshop with no signal.