The whole site has been redrawn — warmer, calmer, and easier on your eyes — in dark and light alike.

✨ A new look, everywhere

Every page now shares one design: warm linen and burnt orange, rounder shapes, and type chosen for reading.

• 🎨 Calm pages, loud covers — the design stays quiet so the book artwork supplies the colour.
• 🌗 Two proper modes — dark and light are both first-class; flip them with the sun icon in the top bar.
• 📱 Kinder to thumbs — bigger touch targets and a menu built for phones.

📚 The homepage shows the promise

The top of the homepage now demonstrates what we do instead of saying it.

• 🗂️ A series a day — one real series settles out of a jumble into its numbered reading order.
• 👆 Every cover opens its book — nothing on the shelf is decoration.
• 🔢 Honest numbers — the counts you see are read live from the catalogue, never typed in.

Same catalogue, same account, same everything underneath — only the clothes changed.

Ready for a wander? Browse the books · See today's series

Not just which books you're reading — how far through each one you've got.

How far through you are

Open any book and press the progress button, under the shelf controls you already use.

• 📊 A number, not a guess: type a percentage and your library shows "Reading · 34%".
• ✅ Finish in one tap: Mark as finished moves the book to your Read shelf and completes it.
• 📱 Edit anywhere: change it straight from My Library without opening the book — a bottom sheet on your phone.

Series counts you can trust

A book you gave up on used to count as one you'd read.

• 🏆 The trophy means something: Complete now goes only to a series you actually finished.
• 📗 Nothing left hanging: the bar still fills for a series you've closed the book on, and the caption reads "27/28 read".

Ready? Open a book you're partway through.

Say who you are, and turn your public page into a shelf other readers can actually browse.

Your details, in one place

Everything about how you appear now sits behind the person icon, on the Profile tab of Settings.

• 📸 Look like someone: a profile photo from your own device, a display name, and pronouns.
• ✍️ Say something: a short bio, plus your TikTok, Instagram and website.
• 🧭 One place, not three: the separate edit page is gone. Saves happen where you are, and a refused save now names the detail to change and why.

Your public page, rebuilt

Your page used to be six stacked rows of covers. It is now the same list you already use on My Library.

• 🔍 Find anything: search, filters and sorting across Books, Series, Authors and Reviews.
• 🔢 Know what's there: every tab carries its count, down to an honest "showing 1 to 20 of 143".
• 📚 Every shelf, in order: Paused, Did Not Finish and Owned are there too, in the same order as My Library.

Private profiles stay private. Nothing here changes who can see you.

Ready to make your shelf yours? Open Settings, or view your page.

Every release day, fully unpacked.

Pick any date on the shelf and you land straight on that day's releases — every book, grouped by genre, no extra clicking to get there first. Big day? Flip through the pages instead of endless scrolling. Quiet day? It shows clean, with nothing extra in the way.

The bigger change is what's now included. New Book Releases used to only reach back a few weeks. It now reaches back through the entire shelf — every book already living on Shelf & Shadows has a release day here, including the handful that never had an official publish date on record. Those got a close approximate one instead of staying invisible.

So whether you're catching what dropped yesterday or working your way back through months of releases, it's all here — organized by day, one click from the top.

Head to New Book Releases and pick a day.

https://www.shelfandshadows.com/new-book-releases

Following authors on the site is useful, but it only works when you are on the site. Most of the time, you are not — you are reading, or working, or doing something that is not checking a website for book updates.

Now you can subscribe to email notifications for the authors and series you care about. When a new book is added to the site, we will send you a short email with what was added and where it fits in the series. No marketing, no weekly digests you did not ask for — just the book, when it appears.

Head to any author or series page and hit Subscribe. You choose what you want to hear about. If you follow five authors but only want email alerts for two of them, that is fine. You can manage your notification preferences from your account settings at any time.

We built this on our own self-hosted email infrastructure, which means your inbox is not at the mercy of a third-party marketing platform. Emails come from us, they contain what we said they would contain, and you can unsubscribe in one click.

If you are the kind of reader who wants to know the moment a new book drops, this is for you.

Every author page on Shelf & Shadows now includes a section answering the questions readers actually ask. What order should I read this series in? Are there spin-offs? Is the series finished? Do I need to read one series before starting another?

These are not generic FAQs. They are sourced from real search queries — the things people type into Google when they are standing in a bookshop or scrolling their Kindle library trying to figure out where to start. We answer them clearly, with specifics, right on the author page where you need them.

If an author has written multiple series that share a universe, the FAQ explains the connections and whether reading order matters. If a series has a commonly recommended starting point that differs from publication order, that is covered too.

We added these because a good reading order page should not just list the books — it should answer the questions that made you look up the reading order in the first place. The reading order is the answer to one question. The FAQ handles the rest.

Browse any author page and scroll to the Questions section.

A reading order site tells you what order to read books in. But if you are working through multiple series at once — and most readers are — you need somewhere to keep track of what you are actually reading.

You can now save any book to your personal library on Shelf & Shadows. Every book can be marked as one of three statuses: Want to Read, Currently Reading, or Read. Your library is your own space to organise what you have finished, what you are in the middle of, and what you want to get to next.

Open any book page and click the bookmark icon to add it. You can also mark books directly from series pages as you browse reading orders. Your full library is always available from your account.

We designed this around how readers actually think about books — not as a database to manage, but as a shelf to glance at. What am I reading? What is next? What caught my eye last week? That is what your library answers.

When you find an author you enjoy, you probably want to know when something new appears in their catalogue. A new book in an ongoing series, or the start of something entirely new.

You can now follow any author on Shelf & Shadows. Hit the Follow button on their author page, and that author is added to your followed list. When new books are added to their catalogue on the site, you will know about it.

Following is free, takes one click, and you can manage who you follow from your account at any time. No limits on how many authors you follow.

We built this because the moment between finishing a series and wondering "has this author written anything else?" should not require a Google search. If you are already here looking up reading orders, the updates should come to you.

Open any author page and hit Follow to get started.

Shelf & Shadows helps readers find the right order for book series — but knowing the order is only half the problem. The other half is remembering where you left off.

You can now mark which books you have finished in any series and see at a glance exactly where you left off. Open any series page and your progress is right there — which books you have read, which ones are next, and how far through the series you are.

This works across every series on the site, whether you are three books into a trilogy or twenty-eight deep into Jack Reacher. Your progress is saved to your account, so it follows you between devices.

We thought about how readers actually use a site like this. You look up a series, you check where you are, you find the next book. That should take seconds, not a trip to your Amazon order history.

Open any series page and start marking books as read. Your place is saved automatically.

Shelf & Shadows is now on Pinterest.

We publish curated pins for book series — reading order guides, author spotlights, and series collections designed to be saved to your boards. If you are the kind of reader who plans your next read visually or likes saving book recommendations for later, this is where to find us.

Every pin links back to the relevant author or series page on the site, so you can go from a pin to a full reading order in one tap. We are adding new pins regularly as we expand the catalogue.

We chose Pinterest because it is where readers already collect and organise the things they want to come back to. A reading order guide pinned to a "Books to Read" board is useful in a way that a social media post disappearing into a feed is not. It stays there until you are ready for it.

Follow us on Pinterest and save the series you are interested in. When you are ready to start reading, the reading order is one click away.