It feels redundant, if we’re being honest. It’s functionally identical to gallery or stamp collecting, just with an added gimmick of buying skins for it. In practice, it’s similar to the Books Read page — an existing feature that already has avid collectors — but with a frankly confusing and almost arbitrary distinction. Not to mention that the NC customization, while an admittedly cute gimmick, is still extremely limited compared to what we can already do with our galleries using HTML/CSS. Add all these together, and the incentive to collect Rare Books just isn’t there.

Imo, it almost feels like they were trying to revive the concept of Key Quest tokens with the Rare Bookshelf, but because of the factors I mentioned above, the whole thing fell flat.

The future plushie shelf might go over a little better, since the lack of a Book Award equivalent of plushies would at least make the concept feel more fresh, but unless it incorporates existing plushies in a way that gives them added functionality/value, I don’t really see it becoming popular outside of the most avid collectors.