Would anyone have any good recommendations for a book cataloging app/site? My family has informed me it would be less stressful buying me new books if they could check what I already own, so I figured I’d look around to see what’s out there. (I would use this mostly for books in English.)
Features I’d be interested in:
ability to scan barcodes to add the books
ability to scan both my English and Japanese books, + any other random languages I have lying around
ability to add a manual/custom book entry
ability to export my added books
ability to add books into user-defined categories/tags (e.g. “Manga”, “Japanese”, “Wishlist”, etc.)
ability to export only certain tags/categories
if an app, it’s available for Android
ability to import books from digital storefronts
That’s kind of a lot, I know. Anything you guys know of that might meet those criteria? Note that I don’t need the ability to track my reading status with a book, just the ability to say I own it. (Or would like it, if I can tag it that way.)
My brother gets a lot of books as gifts, but he just uses a wishlist. Probably Amazon, but not sure (it could just be a literal list). Is there a reason you want to track what you’ve read and not what you want?
In this case it’d be tracking what I own and what I want, regardless of whether I’ve read it or not. I do have a running Amazon wishlist I add stuff into, but this would also be for the case where, for example, my sister is browsing a book store and sees something neat, but isn’t sure if I own it already and doesn’t want to ask (if it’s supposed to be a surprise gift).
I did find Libib in the meantime and have been playing around with it; it seems like it’s got some good features, though I’ll need to keep playing with it.
Library Thing comes to mind. It’s ugly, but it does have Japanese books and I believe it can connect to calibre to see what you have in ebooks if that’s where they are. I have used it very little, so I can’t really vouch for its user experience. 2026 is the year I work on my backlog though, so I’m hoping to actually use LT more in the coming year.
Back when I had a macbook, I used to have Delicious Library. At some point when moving platforms, I remember looking up for Windows alternatives and since I wasn’t satisfied I just dropped it entirely.
Libib is subscription based, which is kind of a bummer. If you are able to find something that is not subscription based, I might start cataloguing back what I have too.
Anything particular? I don’t use the site, except if it comes up when I’m looking for reviews
I use Bookmeter as well, but idk if that’s available in English
Tbh I would probably just use a spreadsheet if I were in your position. Seems easier than figuring out all this stuff with apps, plus easily searchable or sortable
Hmmm, mostly UI stuff, I suppose. The site is incredibly busy, and it’s gotten less user-friendly over the years imo. Plus the social aspect has really been pushed, and I don’t care to have that on every page.
It’s just going to take a long time to catalogue everything, so I was hoping to save some hassle by having some if it some for me. Libib has been okay so far, but I am a bit concerned about the time I’ll need to take to enter stuff manually. More of my books apparently aren’t easily searchable (on Amazon, I presume), than I realized.
Library thing is free and has an app and website (I use the site and iOS app but there is an Android one available). I use it for my Japanese books and some of my English ones too but it supports multiple languages. It takes a little to get to grips with but once you get the hang of it, it seems pretty useful. I have separate collections for my manga, light novels etc.
It definitely has the following:
ability to scan barcodes to add the books
ability to scan both my English and Japanese books, + any other random languages I have lying around
ability to add a manual/custom book entry
ability to add books into user-defined categories/tags (e.g. “Manga”, “Japanese”, “Wishlist”, etc.)
if an app, it’s available for Android
There are options for exporting but I’ve not used that side of things so unsure exactly what you can do that way
Apparently you can import books from digital storefronts to LibraryThing, but it often requires a workaround using the Universal Import tool with a CSV file of your book data.
Unless you’re often gifted things from used book stores (which is awesome, but less common) it might be fine to let those ones slide as they’re presumably out of print
I use storygraph as well to track my English language books. You can mark books owned on there and way less pushing the social nonsense than goodreads. (Also not owned by Amazon.)
Storygraph is awful for non english content (or even non-mainstream english content) which is the main reason I haven’t switched to it. I still use goodreads, I don’t think anything does its job as well as goodreads does, you just have to ignore the bloat.
Since I’m travelling I only glanced at it. I’d rather a software solution that is in my computer, but I guess I could live with the free tier as long as data export is in a complete way, allowing me to backup.
I’ll take a better look once I get back. Thanks for pointing it out.
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