About Booklister

Booklister makes printable booklists for library displays. You pick books, arrange them on a two-page bifold, generate a cover collage from the book covers, add your library's branding, and export a print-ready PDF. It runs in the browser, saves your work locally, and doesn't require an account.

A printed list pairs well with a physical book display, outreach events, or school visits. Even when the display itself is picked clean and every book on the shelf has been checked out, a patron can still take the list with them and place holds on the titles they want.

Why I built it

I'm a librarian in the Bay Area, and for years I cobbled booklists together in Word, Publisher, Canva, whatever was on hand. Each one was either too fussy for the job or didn't do something I needed. The dedicated tools that handle this well are expensive, and the booklist features built into other library software tend to feel like an afterthought. I wanted one piece of software that did the specific thing librarians actually do: a clean bifold layout, auto-pulled book info so I wasn't typing everything twice, a way to make a nice cover without opening Photoshop, and a print-ready PDF at the end. Booklister is what I made for myself, and other librarians started asking if they could use it too.

How it works

Search for a book by title, author, or keyword. Booklister queries the Open Library catalog and returns covers and metadata. Click to add books to your list, drag to reorder, and star the ones you want on the front cover. Pick a collage layout, add a title, drop in your library's logo, and hit Generate PDF. The output is an 11"×8.5" landscape bifold at 600 DPI. Print it double-sided, fold it in half, and you have a finished booklist. You can also save your list to a file and load it back later to keep editing or spin off a new version from it.

About Folio

Folio is the little cat who lives in the corner of the screen and reacts to what you're doing. His name comes from bookbinding: a folio is a single sheet of paper folded once down the middle, producing four pages. Booklister makes folios, so naming the mascot after the format felt right.

About the AI

There is one place Booklister uses AI: the "Magic" button on each title, which drafts a description for you. When you press it, the tool runs a live web search for the title's synopsis and plot summary, then hands those results to a language model with instructions to write a short reader's advisory blurb grounded in what was actually found. Each draft is built from real search results, not pulled from a model's training data.

That said, an AI draft is a starting point, not a finished product. Read what came back, edit it, or clear the field and write your own from scratch. Every title, author, and description in the tool is fully editable. You are always the author of your booklist.

Using it

Booklister is free for individual librarians. Open it, make your list, print it, use it however you like. Institutions interested in a formally licensed version (custom branding, a dedicated subdomain, ongoing support) can read more on the For Libraries page.