When Baker & Taylor closed, small libraries lost the tools that told them what to order. Shelfly is the selection layer that replaces them. It works from your circulation and the lists you already trust, tells you what to buy, and hands you an order and shelf-ready records. It works with the catalog and vendors you already have.
The gap
Baker & Taylor's platform came bundled with your book orders, so it felt free. The dedicated analytics tools that do real demand-driven selection are priced for big systems. Small libraries were caught in the middle.
libraries relied on a single wholesaler for selection and ordering before it wound down.
a year is the going rate for enterprise collection-analytics platforms, scaled to population and aimed at large systems.
of items public libraries buy never circulate. Better selection is the cheapest collection you'll ever build.
What it does
Shelfly is the brains, not the warehouse. It decides and prepares; you order from whatever vendor you like.
Shelfly works from your holdings and circulation to surface the titles you already own that have more holds than copies can serve, with a suggested number of copies to add. The most defensible buy you can make.
Feed it any reading list. Bestsellers, LibraryReads, award lists, starred reviews. Shelfly resolves each title, drops anything you already own, and surfaces the genuine new candidates worth bringing in.
Your selectors review the list, adjust quantities, set titles aside, and add notes. Every decision is yours. Shelfly just removes the busywork that used to eat the afternoon.
Approved titles become a clean order file for any vendor and MARC records ready to import into your ILS. No re-keying, no vendor lock-in, no warehouse required.
In progressDirect API connections to your favorite booksellers, so approved orders go straight to the vendor you already use, no export step in between.
How it works
You export your holdings and circulation from your ILS, a few clicks in Polaris, and Shelfly works from that. Direct, automatic ILS sync is on the way so even that step disappears.
Each week it scores demand on what you own and pulls new candidates from the reading lists you choose, matched against your collection so nothing is a duplicate.
Open the queue, approve what fits your community and budget, adjust copies, set the rest aside. The judgment stays with your librarians.
Export the order to your vendor and the MARC records to your ILS. Done in minutes instead of an afternoon.
Pricing
Billed annually. Every plan includes the full selection loop, ILS sync, reading-list discovery, and MARC export. Pick by the size of your library.
Shelfly is already in daily use at our founding library. OPLIN libraries get their first three months free as part of our charter cohort.
Why it costs what it does
The old platform felt free because it was paid for inside the price of every book you ordered. When the wholesaler closed, that hidden subsidy disappeared, and the survivors prioritize their largest accounts.
The tools that actually do demand-driven selection are sold as enterprise analytics, priced by population, running well into five figures a year. That math never worked for a small library.
Shelfly is pure software. No warehouse, no inventory, shared infrastructure across every library on it. That's why a flat monthly fee covers it, far below enterprise analytics and with nothing buried in your book margins. You pay for the selection intelligence, and that's all.