21
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Cataloging your home library
I have a decent sized library of probably around 2-300 books, and it has been on my list of projects to-do to make a catalog/database for my library to quickly reference what I have. Do any of you catalog your libraries and if so what do you use for it?
I know Libid and LibraryThing are two of the big website/app ones, and it could be done with a Google Sheet or similar, but I was wondering if anyone here has any experience before I really get started.
I asked for similar advice on Tildes a while back and concluded there wasn't really suitable software for what I wanted. I settled on using Google Sheets because I could make whatever columns I wanted (room, shelf, publication year, etc.), and it has collaborative editing built in so I could get some assistance with filling it out.
My biggest problem was starting since the quantity of books was so imposing! I settled on just doing one shelf every day and that worked for me.
I actually started setting up a Google Sheet for this a few years ago, but since I have let it get very out of date, moved my books around, and inherited my dad's book collection, so the whole thing needs completely redone. I want to have things set up by ISBN which I didnt add last time.
I'm not as tech savvy as most people on here, is there a way to get Google Sheets to search the ISBN to fill out title/author/ect? I found one that used to work, but it used ISBNDB, which has since started charging for the API and I can't figure how to switch it to OpenLibrary or another free one.
I was really hoping there'd be a free API for ISBN lookup but I've had no luck finding one. It's a very decentralised system, so there's no guarantee that a database has every ISBN. And of course some books don't have one for one reason or another. I've still been my noting the ISBNs of my books in case a service becomes available.
I had a quick look at OpenLibrary and I immediately hit a discrepancy with the stated ISBN and what I have logged. I suppose that could be on my end, or else I was just unlucky as some of my other books seem to be recognised fine, but it's something to keep in mind if you use it.
I have pretty good experience with the html5-qrcode JavaScript library for scanning ISBNs and the Google Books API for grabbing the book data, which is still free for a small-scale use. The success rate is sufficiently good for me. I would say that the info is incorrect in about 1 out of 50 books. I use it for common books, though - I am not sure how it would work with rare books. You can give it a try:
https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?q=isbn:9780007232161
That's unfortunate to hear, but not entirely unexpected. It used to work, but now that I check it was last updated in 2013, so it probably hasn't worked for years. It would have saved a lot of time, but oh well.
On the topic of discrepancies on ISBN lookup, while I was cataloging some books today some older books only had Library of Congress catalog card number, and I could not get a single one to come up with the right book, and thats using the loc.gov website.
along with google books, which is alright, openlibrary has JSON
once you have that, have your script pull the
keyso you can buildwhich sometimes has some other info you might be after. I'd combine google books and this and maybe even a scrape of goodreads (the second link has the goodreads ID)
personally, I started something like this years ago but gave up. For an industry full of academics, ISBNs etc is an absolute fucking mess. It should be one ID per book with sub IDs for versions -- like discogs does for music.
Spreadsheets are likely best but you might like CLZ: https://clz.com/books
or Calibre: https://www.davideaversa.it/blog/how-calibre-manage-physical-library/
I use TheStoryGraph and mark the ones I own as "owned". I have yet to stand in front of my bookshelf and fully complete the task (I probably should), or to go through my Kindle library and mark those as owned (... nightmare), but at least I rarely have to manually enter any data. There's an "owned" tab on my profile and I can easily search or filter it for whatever I'm looking for.
I use TheStoryGraph to track the books I am currently reading and to have stats on what I have read, but I don't think it is enough for my needs for a library database.
My primary use is to see what I have, whether it's paperback or hardback since I massively prefer hardback, and to see where it physically is on my shelfs. I do a lot of used book stores and thrift stores, and I have a bad memory for what books I need. I know I have like 3 copies of Tolkiens Book of Lost Tales 2 because I always forget which one I need.
It would be convenient to use TheStoryGraph since I already use it and keep everything in one app, but I would really like a database where I could look through everything I have at once, and maybe have filters like genre.
You can filter by edition type, genre, whether you've read it or not, etc. in the "owned" list. It has quite a lot of functionality.
I'm no expert on library stuff specifically, but my $0.02 would be to do it in a spreadsheet or something just to get a feel for it and have the data on hand. You can fill it out bit by bit and then you have the data collected if you ever want to switch to some fancier system.
(this is just what works for me, since I constantly let the perfect be the enemy of the good...)
If you take a photo of your bookshelves, you can get ai to list them out in a spreadsheet. It does a pretty good job, but you may have to correct a few errors and add the ones without text on the spine. It can also add columns for location on shelf, genre, language, etc.
I have been working since the early AI days to create a GPT where I can take pictures of bookshelves in used bookstores/thrift stores and have it search for books I am looking for on a 'wanted list' that I provide it. It is getting VERY good, still cannot take full floor to ceiling single pictures, but if I get just 2-3 shelves in a picture it will do a pretty good job. Not yet useful in the real world due to the amount of pictures needing to be taken and the multiple minutes per image processing time. It also has trouble handling large wanted lists. Accuracy has improved from very bad to shockingly good though.
I'm not a huge fan of AI, but that would definitely be the easiest way.
Not entirely related but it made me think of https://prelingerlibrary.org/stacks/
Calibre.
I have no experience, but I would be tempted to try this Home Library Management System on GitHub. These kinds of one-person passion projects are, to me, one of the best features of the internet.
I have this bookmarked to look more into when I have more time for tech projects. For now I'm cleaning up my Google Sheet and doing some experiments with Libid, but I prefer function over style, so I will probably stick with a spreadsheet until I can look into a more specified program.
I agree completely about those passion projects being such a breath of fresh air in the current age of the internet where everything is made by the big 5, I always try to support FOSS whenever I can.
I have over 3000 books in a person library in my house. I previously made a comment HERE about how I handle indexing them all so I can access the list from my phone while in used bookstores ect.
I never could find software that checked all the boxes for me, and while making a list like this looks like a huge amount of work, it is, but I started it when my collection was probably more like what you are dealing with and then it has grown slowly over the years. I also enjoy making lists and indexes of things, I'm weird. lol.
Our family collection is just over 600 books and we have a spreadsheet with the metadata we care about.
I need to sell about a thousand old books, and I am familiar with Flask, so I quickly knocked together a simple app to catalogue them. It is heavily tailored to my needs, which is one of the reasons I did not want to use something like Libid - I needed something that would generate markdown, links to prefill search forms of specific stores where I check prices, etc. If you are a bit technical, you can easily vibe-code something tailored to your needs.
For me, the most important need was avoiding manually writing book titles and authors, and looking up the publisher, year of publishing, and all that stuff. For that, you can use html5-qrcode to scan an ISBN, pass it to the Google Books API to get the book info, and feed that info to the storage of your choice. I use PostgreSQL, but I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to feed it to Google Sheets. Older books don't have barcodes, so I was thinking about using AI to recognize those, but I have not gotten to it yet. I don't have that many books without barcodes, so it does not feel urgent enough.
BTW, all that selling books turned into a surprisingly fun pet project - instead of using some prefabricated online e-shop, I even made my own simple second-hand bookstore that is a static site generated with the Hugo static site generator (with a bit of JavaScript to handle shopping cart, client-side search with Fuse.js, and sending forms via Web3Forms).
I literally vibe-coded my own solution and it’s been a pretty fun learning experience! Using Flask, googles book API, and sqlite3 for the database. It’s getting feature bloat at this point as I keep thinking of features to add but it started off as a simple CLI tool isbn fetch into database and it just snowballed from there as I iterated on it.
Pretty much the same for me. Currently just JSON files for the database but that's starting to get unwieldy. My main interface for it is a Raspberry Pi 3 with the old 7" screen and a barcode scanner, but for scanning in an entire shelf there's a command line tool. Not sure if it'll help anyone else but here's the source for it https://github.com/magico13/Bookwyrms-Hoard
I thought about this, but I have a huge stack of projects, so for now I am looking for something ready to go. Maybe at some point in the future.
...i've never used it, but isn't this what delicious library was created to do?..i'm curious to read folks' experience with embracing and ultimately migrating away from the platform as a case study...
I just got my first Apple product in my life a few weeks ago, so I'm not too hip on what Apple has to offer. I just looked it up though and it looks like they stopped support last year and took down the apps? From a brief glance it looks similar to Libid or LibraryThing.
I am concerned about using one of the services because you have no guarantee that will keep supporting it. Delicious Library is a great example that released in November 2004, and ran for 20 years. I would be so upset to have 20 years of cataloging lost because the app got shut down, which is my biggest reason for leaning so hard towards Google Sheets.
A million years ago, I made a website to catalog my books and used a CueCat barcode scanner, which just populates a USB keyboard. A brief look at Amazon suggested a wide variety of these are available for under $100. These days you could probably use a phone camera app, but I bet a dedicated scanner would be faster.
Unfortunately, the Amazon API I was using to pull book data is long gone. It looks like the library of congress has an API, but I didn't dig around in it. I wonder if just a (script driven) google search for the ISBN might be a good strategy.
I've used Calibre before and it's good.
I've taken to using an open source app on my phone called OpenReads. It lets me track books, what's in progress/complete/unfinished/to be read; the start and finish date of the book; the media (book, ebook, audiobook, etc.); and it lets you pick a photo for the cover from the web if one isn't already in the database.
You can manually add books as well, which is nice. It also gives a few basic stats like how many books you've read over the year, which books per month, how many pages you've read, which media of books you preferred, average rating, longest reading journey - stuff like that. It's a tidy little app, not fussy, not trying to sell anything, and you can export/import CSV files for local or cloud backups. I hope that helps! If nothing else, it's another app to take a peek at to see if it's the right fit.