You’re encouraged to write a little bio of yourself and little recommendation notes that you can either place on your shelf or in your books, so that people can learn more about you and your selection.

You can do that at home or you can do it at the library, where we will be providing cards, pens, stickers, tape, etc.

You can also leave out cards for library members to write messages to you or exchange thoughts about your books.

You can decorate your bookshelf however you want or choose to leave it bare, it’s up to you! You can also change up the books on your shelf and switch genres anytime.

Each shelf is about 45cm (w) x 30cm (h) x 35cm (d), which can hold 10 to 20 books per shelf, depending on the size of the books.

We also have shelves of the same size but of a vertical orientation to accommodate larger art books or books of non-standard sizes. Let us know if you need such a shelf!

Every bookshelf will have its own ID. Apart from the children’s books, which we will be grouping into an area, we will be randomly assigning shelves to everyone else. No shelf is better or worse in our shared library ❤️ Whether a shelf is higher up or hidden at the end around the corner, every shelf is a potential for new connections, new thoughts, new beginnings (or even endings). It will be an adventure for everyone who loves books, I hope.

Track your books by adding them into our digital library catalog by scanning their ISBN codes. You can do that yourself while you are setting up at the library. We use a simple and user-friendly system. Our librarians will guide you =)

This is for books that you want to lend and does not include books/items that you want to sell.

As we’re mainly a lending and sharing library, we’d like to encourage you to reserve most of your books/items for sharing or browsing.

For books/items you may want to sell, you can set your own prices, label your items and print out a payment QR code to receive payment directly.

We won’t be tracking or taking a cut from your sales.

Library patrons pay an annual fee of SGD$25 to become a member of the library. They can borrow up to five books per visit.

There are no late fees but library patrons are encouraged to return their books within a month so that others can continue to share the books.

All books are checked out by scanning their ISBN codes. We track book circulation using a digital catalog management system, which allows us to see which books have been checked out and who they have been lent to, and send return reminders etc.

Bookshelf-owners are considered lifetime patrons of the library and can borrow up to five books per visit too!

As a bookshelf-owner, you will be able to rent our space at an affordable SGD$20/hour (about a fifth of the usual rate) for your own events. We hope this will encourage you to create your own community events revolving around the things you care deeply about!

Our space is about 450sf. With the tables and chairs in, we will probably have space to accommodate about 20 pax indoors. If we remove the furniture, we might be able to fit 10 more.

As we are a community library, it’s inevitable that our books will experience some wear and tear as they get borrowed, read and circulated. Books that are too precious and cannot be subjected to any wear and tear or slight damage at all might not be suitable for our shared library.

We hope to foster, to the best of our abilities, an atmosphere where people would love and take care of these precious books. But in the spirit of sharing, we also hope to offer our books to others generously and trust that others would do their best to take care of our books.

If you’d like to participate more in the community and get to know your fellow bookshelf-owners, volunteer as a librarian, help out with various aspects of the library, create and run programmes for the library etc, please join our Telegram group. Only if you want to of course, no obligations =) You can also join our Telegram channel and be a lurker!

When your lease is about to come to an end, we’ll contact you two months in advance to see if you’d like to continue. Existing bookshelf owners will have priority to renew your lease at the same rate or end it.

We’re experimenting with different ‘policies’ as we go, so some of these might change as we adjust to new situations or feedback! Whatever happens, we endeavour to keep things simple, fair, open and flexible.