I started to use Obsidian one year ago and I’m continually amazed by how many things you can do with it.

Keeping track of the books that I’ve read or I want to read is one of the thing that I like to do inside Obsidian.
There are various methods to do this — Dataview queries or DB Folder are two example — but in this article I am going to show you how I do that by using Book Search and Projects plugins.

Plugins

I use three plugins:

• Templater: to create a template that will be used to create our Book Note.
• Book Search: to search the book that I want to save in the “library”.
• Projects: to make the gallery view.

Templater

Let’s start by creating the template that will be used in our book notes.

• YAML Frontmatter

<%"---"%>    
tag: Book    
title: "{{title}}"    
author: [{{author}}]    
publish: {{publishDate}}    
cover: {{coverUrl}}    
status: unread  
<%"---"%>

The title, author, publish and cover fields will be filled in automatically thanks to the Book Search plugin. I’ve also added a tag field Book and a status field set to unread since when I add a book is because I want to read it in the future. I will change the status to read once I’ve finished to read the book.

• Title and Cover Markup

![cover|150]({{coverUrl}})  
# {{title}}

The first line will show the cover image above the title in the body of the note. With the second line, the title of the book will be automatically used for the H1 title of the note.

This is how the template note looks like:

Now we are ready to create our book notes.

Book Search

These are my Book Search plugin settings:

Every book I will search and select through this plugin, will be placed inside my vault, in a folder called “Books”. The title of the book will be automatically used as the name of the file, and the Book Template will be automatically applied to the note.

To use the plugin you just need to open your command palette, search for Book Search and click on “Create new book note”.

Alternatively you can click on the button in your ribbon menu.

After that, you will see a search bar where you have to write the book you are looking for.

By clicking the button “Search”, Book Search will show you the results from which you can select the book you were looking for.

At this point the plugin will automatically create your note.

While I’m reading the book, I use this note to write down some observations; at the end, once I’ve finished to read it, I write down my final thoughts and impressions.

Projects

Now that we have our folder that contains all our books, it would be nice to have a database that helps you to consult them easily and quickly. For this purpose I like to use Projects.

I love this plugin because it allows you to manage, keep track and visualize your notes by using table, calendar, board and gallery views.
Today we will take a look at the gallery view but I will write other articles about this plugin in the future for other use cases.

First of all, we have to open the command palette, search for Projects and click on “Create new project”.

Alternatively you can open your projects by clicking the button “Open projects” in your ribbon menu.

Once the plugin has been launched, click on “Create new project” button.

At this point you need to set up your project by choosing a name, how you want to define which notes to include and the path to the folder you want to manage.
In this case, I choose “Library” as project name and I want to include notes from a specific folder called “Books”.

Once you hit the “Create project” button, the plugin will automatically show you a table view.

Let’s add a gallery view by clicking the “+” sign at the top, near to the “Table” button.

This is how it will looks like at the beginning.

As you can see we need to make some adjustments: we need to fix the cover, the fields we want to include in the cards and the cards width.

To show the covers, you have to choose which metadata field in your book notes should be used as cover. To do that, open the Cover menu on the top right and choose the “cover” field.

After that, set the image option to “Fit image” or your cover will look all stretched.

Now I want to include some of the metadata fields inside my cards. To do that open the Include fields menu and choose the fields that you want to see; I choose to include the author name, the publish date and the status.

Lastly, I want to adjust the card width at 250 pixels: hit the settings icon next to the Include fields menu and set the width you prefer.

This is the final result:

Final tip: once you’ve read a book, you can click on the cover and change the status from unread to read directly from there!

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of this article, there are various methods to keep track of your books, but I like to use Projects plugin and I think it works really well for this use case.

Which method do you use? Did you already know the Projects plugin?
Feel free to comment and share your thoughts!