Bookshelf
Your finished books, beautifully displayed — publish your manuscript, celebrate the milestone, and read it on simulated devices.
What Is the Bookshelf?
The Bookshelf is where your finished books live. It's the transition point where a project stops being something you're working on and becomes something you celebrate, read, and preview. Think of it as your personal library of published works inside Sappar Studio.
Books appear on the Bookshelf only after you publish them. Your in-progress projects stay in the Projects view — the Bookshelf is reserved for completed work.
Publishing to the Bookshelf
When your book is ready, hit Publish from the editor. Sappar will ask you to confirm with a simple "Move to Bookshelf?" dialog. Behind the scenes, Sappar saves your project, runs the full layout pipeline, and generates a cover snapshot from the first page of your book. The entire process takes just a moment.
Publishing to the Bookshelf is separate from exporting for print or digital distribution. It's an internal milestone — a way to mark your book as complete and unlock the reading experience.
The Celebration Screen
After publishing, Sappar presents a full-screen celebration. Your first publish shows "First Edition" with a dramatic reveal. Subsequent publishes show "Revised Edition" with a calmer layout. Your book's stats — word count, page count, chapters, and writing duration — are revealed one at a time.
From the celebration screen, you can go straight to the Reader to experience your book, or head Back to Projects to keep working on other manuscripts.
The Bookshelf Grid
The Bookshelf displays your published books as cover-forward cards in a grid. Each card shows the book's cover image (generated from the first page), title, author, and publish date. A density slider lets you adjust the grid layout — from compact (4 columns) to spacious (2 columns) — so you can browse at whatever scale you prefer.
Right-click any book card for quick actions:
- Open in Reader — read your book in the immersive reader
- Move to Projects — unpublish and return the book to your active projects
- Show in Finder — reveal the project file on disk
- Export Again — re-export for print or digital distribution
The Immersive Reader
Opening a book from the Bookshelf launches the Reader — a dedicated reading experience that lets you preview your book on simulated devices. Sappar generates a real PDF or EPUB using the same export pipeline as your final output, so what you see is exactly what your readers will get.
Three device modes are available:
- Physical — dual-page spreads, just like a printed book. Navigate with arrow keys, clicking the page edges, or the chapter sidebar.
- Kindle — your EPUB rendered inside a simulated Kindle Paperwhite frame, so you can see how it reads on an e-reader.
- iPad — your book displayed inside a simulated iPad frame for tablet preview.
A chapter navigation sidebar slides in from the left with chapter names and page numbers, making it easy to jump around your book.
Use the Reader to catch formatting issues you might miss in the editor preview. Seeing your book rendered as a real PDF on simulated devices reveals things like widows, orphans, and spacing issues that are hard to spot otherwise.
Republishing
Made changes to a published book? Move it back to Projects, edit it, and publish again. Sappar keeps a full publish history — every edition is recorded with its version number, word count, page count, and timestamp. A fresh cover snapshot is generated each time you republish.