With the introduction of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle, bookshelves face the prospect of becoming a thing of the past. In many homes, the days of book collections numbering in the hundreds (even thousands!) are already long gone. There’s a good chance that many of the current generation will be brought up entirely on computers – and the bookshelves will slowly fade to become a distant memory.

….But, bookshelves have never been for just holding books.

With a little imagination, your shelves can be transformed into a brilliant special feature by simply adding some LED tape. Why not light up your bookshelves with LED tape to bring them back to life – make them into an aesthetic focal point?

Shelving with White InStyle LED Tape installed in a grove to hide it in the underside of each shelf

In the past, trying to add illumination to your bookshelves would have been a major project, not to mention a potential headache. For one thing, shelving offers very limited space in which to fit lighting such as fluorescent tubes or light bulbs. And secondly, the heat generated from traditional bulbs or florescent tubes could actually damage your books – or could even be a fire hazard!

That’s the reason why most bookshelves have remained unlit until now, and are fast becoming outdated and unattractive.

But now there’s a game-changer. With the advent of LED tape, the old restrictions and limitations are gone…..

What makes LED tape ideal for lighting up your bookshelf?

LED tapes use approx 90% less energy than traditional filament based light sources. So LED tape not only helps the environment by reducing your carbon footprint – it will also  save you money on its running costs.

In fact, some LED tapes draw as little as 4.8w per metre – yet still kick out a powerful 360 lumens per metre.

A commercial-grade LED tape will give over 70,000 hours of life expectancy, and will still be outputting 70% of its original brightness even after all that time. This means LED tape is an ideal fit-and-forget product, with no maintenance and no replacement costs for many years!

Another very attractive feature of quality LED tape is its easy installation. Most projects don’t require fittings or brackets, because LED strips are delivered with 3M self-adhesive backing as standard. So all you have to do is first clean the shelf, wall or other surface. Then simply peel and stick the LED tape into position. Find out more in the ‘bookcase lighting’ section of our positioning LED strips support page.

LED tapes are available in a wide choice of colours. At InStyle, we offer warm white, pure white, red, green, amber and blue single-colour tapes. Or you can choose colour-changing LED tapes (either RGB or RGBW ) that will enable you to set and change your lights to any colour you can imagine, via a wireless controller.

You’ll also be able to dim your LED tape, like traditional lighting. A dimmable transformer and a standard TRIAC dimmer lets you dim straight from the mains power supply. Or alternatively, why not install a dedicated LED receiver and one of our wall dimmers or remote controls?

At just 8mm wide and 3mm depth, the LED tape is very compact and discreet. So it can be hidden almost anywhere while still giving an amazing effect.

Finally, the LED tape is cuttable to the nearest 50mm. This makes it ideal for any size of bookshelf. (Here at InStyle LED we offer a full cutting and soldering service. Simply tell us the lengths you need and we’ll cut the LED tape to your requirements.)