Introducing Showcase: Share Your Book Collection Online

Why We Built This

Scanning a shelf and getting instant resale value is useful. But somewhere in building TroveScore, we kept noticing the same thing: people are genuinely proud of their book collections. A well-curated shelf says something about you — what you've read, what you collect, what you're into. That's worth more than a spreadsheet of titles and prices.

Showcase exists for that reason. It's a page you'd actually want to send to a friend — "here's what I've been reading" — not a settings export. If someone asks what's on your shelf, you don't have to describe it. You send a link.

There's a second reason, less about you and more about us: when your Showcase is out in the world, the people who see it discover TroveScore too. A friend clicks your link, sees their own shelf reflected in what's possible, and ends up scanning their own books. Every Showcase is also a small, honest invitation to try the app — which is exactly the kind of growth we'd rather have than ads.

Two Ways to Look at Your Collection

We built two views for launch, and we were deliberate about which two.

Shelf is the closest thing to how people actually experience a bookshelf in real life — spines lined up, organized, scannable in a few seconds. It's the view for someone who wants the fast answer: what's here, and how much of it.

Map is the opposite instinct. Instead of compressing your whole collection into a list, it gives it room — covers arranged in loose clusters you drag and zoom around, the way you might wander a used bookstore rather than search a catalog. It rewards spending a minute in it, which is exactly what we wanted for a collection someone's proud of.

Between the two, most collections have a natural home. A few hundred books organized tightly by series tends to read best on Shelf. A more eclectic, sprawling collection often feels more alive on Map. You can set either one as your default, and visitors can switch between them.

How to Set Up Your Showcase

1. Sign in. Showcase needs an account — if you've been scanning books without signing in, sign in with Google first so your books and profile carry over.
2. Open Settings and find the Showcase section. Flip the toggle to make your page public — every Showcase starts private until you turn it on.
3. Pick your handle. Set the part of the URL that's yours — trovescore.com/u/yourname — and optionally add a Showcase title, a short bio, and up to three social links.
4. Head to your Trove and open the Showcase tab. It sits alongside "My Trove" and "Scan History" — this is where you shape how the page looks.
5. Choose your view and sort order. Pick Shelf or Map as your default, decide whether for-sale badges and prices show up, and sort by series, category, or a shuffled order.
6. Copy your link and share it. Both Settings and the Showcase tab have a copy-link button — drop it wherever you'd share anything else.

Why Signed-In Only

Scanning itself has never required an account — that's intentional, and it's not changing. Showcase is different because it's not a one-time result, it's a persistent identity: a handle, a link, a page that has to keep working the next time someone visits it, from any device. That only makes sense tied to an account rather than to whichever phone happened to take the photo.

What We're Thinking About Next

Shelf and Map are the two views we felt good shipping first, but they're not the only ones we've sketched out. Along the way we prototyped a cozier "reading room" style layout, and we've got other ideas we haven't built yet — a timeline view, a wall-of-covers gallery, and a few others still in the notebook stage.

Rather than guess which one to build next, we'd rather hear it from people actually using Showcase. If there's a view you wish existed — reading room, gallery, something else entirely — tell us. The "helpful?" feedback link at the bottom of this post, and the feedback option inside the app, both reach us directly, and they genuinely shape what we build next.