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Ask HN: How do I easily catalog a couple thousand physical books?
I own a couple thousand books. I'd like to catalog them all. I have a child who is a broke college student, so I was thinking of paying them to do it over break.
What's the most efficient way to do this from an INTAKE standpoint? I need to get all the ISBNs into a database of some kind.
(The only other info I need is whether or not it's a hardcover or software -- that's something only the physical copy can tell me, everything else I should be able to get from the ISBN.)
I don't want my daughter to have to find and key all the ISBNs in. Can they be scanned in some way? Is the ISBN in the UPC code? Could I buy a cheap bar code scanner and just have her scan away?
- BigBalli 5y agohttps://MyBookList.club https://MyBookList.club Scan the ISBN and it adds it to your library. Then you can also export to CSV if you want. Disclaimer: I made the app. Happy to give free promo codes to anyone interested in trying and give feedback!
- spaztastical 5y agoCan it go by covers with the camera, instead of barcodes? Is there a way to see the books shelved, such as you can see the spines?
- BigBalli 5y agoNot yet but it's in the pipeline!
- metaloha 5y agoYou could put together an OCR app for their phone that could scan the title and author from the spine of the book (or cover) and do a lookup against something like the Google Books API or Open Library to get the ISBN (or store the work in your account on that service).
- spaztastical 5y agoLooks like there is at least one other person interesting in such a thing, but no hits on it existing already: https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/43635/ocr-in-book-spines https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/43635/ocr-in...
- BigBalli 5y agoYep, that's in the pipeline for MyBookList!
- Jtsummers 5y agoIf you're willing to use it, Goodreads lets you scan books to add them to your collection. I've not used it in a while, but I believe there are easy enough ways to get your data out once entered into it. I did that once a long time ago, I imagine it hasn't gotten too much worse since then.
- PaulHoule 5y agoI sampled books from my personal collection and found many didn't have an ISBN. Officially ISBN started in 1970, and I just found one on a book that was printed in 1972, I'm not sure what the adoption curve was like. ISBN is also not guaranteed to be a primary key. It's designed to serve the needs of new book sellers. If a book goes out of print the publisher can reissue the same ISBN to a new book. It's unusual, but South End Press notably was resentful about paying for new blocks of ISBN numbers and recycled ISBNs to "stick it to the man". Some books have an ISBN barcode on them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number#EAN_format_used_in_barcodes,_and_upgrading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu... but you don't want to waste time with a "cheap" barcode reader made in China and sold on EBay. I have played around with those and find that they read barcodes when they feel like reading barcodes and it is quicker to type the codes in.
- wl 5y agoThere's a certain rare, out-of-print book that took me a couple of years to track down. It shares an ISBN with another common, inexpensive, in-print book whose only similarity to the rare one is that it came from the same speciality publisher. Every time I found a copy of the rare book on various used book websites, the common one showed up on my porch instead. Apparently there are a lot of people who treat ISBN as a primary key. A non-trivial number of sellers thought I was trying to pull a return scam on them because they could not be convinced that ISBNs are not unique. The fact that the book I tried to buy generally listed for around $300 and the book I was actually sent went for $15 used really made returns difficult. My search finally ended when a copy showed up on eBay, complete with listing photos. I suspect the price I paid was much higher than usual for a book with similar desirability and rarity because the ISBN collision made it much harder to find.
- teachrdan 5y agoDumb question: If the book was harder for buyers to find, wouldn't that drive the price down, because not everyone who wanted to bid on it would be able to do so?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mindcrime 5y agoUsing the Goodreads app for the initial data loading might be the easiest way. You don't even have to specifically scan the barcode, it can often identify your book from the cover alone. I'll defer to what @Jtsummers said about getting your data out of their database though, as I have not tried that part myself (yet).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 5y agohttps://www.goodreads.com/review/import https://www.goodreads.com/review/import If you're logged in, at the top is an export option which will generate a CSV file. It includes the ISBN if present and a lot of other columns of data that may be useful. I don't think that's how I did it when I pulled the data out years ago, but it works and involves no 3rd parties so that's nice.
- pronoiac 5y agoAs I put some books into storage, the LibraryThing app on my phone could use the camera to scan the isbn bar codes for my books, and I could tag them with "box 6" and the like. Searching for books without isbns wasn't hard.
- Poiesis 5y agoWhile I haven't used it (and it's a Mac-only app with a companion iOS app for scanning), I've heard many people rave about Delicious Library from Delicious Monster: http://www.delicious-monster.com http://www.delicious-monster.com
- js2 5y agoNo price anywhere I can find on that site. It costs $39 in the U.S. Mac App Store though if you want to know before trying it.
- haswell 5y agoI'm a very early user of Delicious Library, and I really loved it back when I was using it. At some point, I lost my library (my fault, not the app's) and could never be bothered to start over. With all of that said, the thing that I loved about Delicious is how rich the experience was, and the ability to catalog any type of media. Looking at their site now though...it really looks like it's stuck in 2009, with HTTP-only site to boot. Has anyone used Delicious recently?
- Terretta 5y agoRelease notes reference March 2020: http://www.delicious-monster.com/release-notes/ http://www.delicious-monster.com/release-notes/ Downloads reference Big Sur (Nov 2020).
- buescher 5y agoDelicious Library is (was?) one of the things that could get me to buy a Mac, but hasn't yet. I'd love to hear if it's still as class-leading as it was back before the smartphone era.
- kgodey 5y agoI have 3,476 books cataloged at the moment on https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/. I bought one of their barcode scanners (https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat) to do my initial cataloging but you could also use the scan feature on their mobile app. I prefer LibraryThing to Goodreads because LibraryThing focuses more on cataloging than social features. Their team also builds software for actual libraries. They source book data from almost 5,000 external sources so it's easy to map ISBN information with the correct edition and cover. You can also get your data out pretty easily, they offer exports in multiple formats. EDIT: For most books, you can scan the barcode on the back to get the ISBN. Mass market paperbacks seem to usually have separate UPCs. The ISBN barcode is often located on the reverse side of the front cover, so you want to scan that one instead of the one on the back.
- Agathos 5y agoOh wow they still have CueCats to sell?
- Izkata 5y agoFrom the sibling links it looks more like they continued making them - it now uses USB instead of PS/2.
- kgodey 5y agoI don't think they make them anymore, according to this website[1], DigitalConvergence had an inventory of 3 million PS/2 CueCats and 1/2 million USB CueCats when they folded. I'm pretty sure LibraryThing bought some of them, they first started selling them in 2006 [2]. [1] http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm#usb http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm#usb [2] https://blog.librarything.com/2006/10/librarything-does-cuecats-were-even-selling-them/ https://blog.librarything.com/2006/10/librarything-does-cuec...
- privong 5y ago> one of their barcode scanners (https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat) That's a blast from the past! I remember getting a CueCat in the mail (I guess in 2000, based on the timeline in the Wikipedia article[0]). Neat to see that they've found another life (many others, by the sounds of it). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
- pahool 5y agoThe "Handy Library" Android app includes an ISBN scanner and allows you to import and export collection data. You could also check out some of the tooling and APIs around openlibrary.org. Unfortunately, I think it's basically a moribund project, but may have sufficient tools for your needs. I know they have a list feature, but I don't think ingestion is particularly easy; nor am I sure of the import/export functionality around their lists. edit: I'd forgotten about librarything (mentioned in another comment). They have better tooling that openlibrary.
- mongol 5y agoCould be worth it to buy a USB scanner.
- mystixx 5y agoI use the free version of Libib.com [1]. Both the Android and iOS apps work just great. The app has an integrated barcode scanner and automatically looks up for the book's info. You can even export the catalog as csv. [1] https://www.libib.com https://www.libib.com
- sumthinprofound 5y agoI've been a happy user of the (free) version of libib for ~8 months now. Android and website both work great for my purposes (800 books, manually added) but as parent states the service can be used with a barcode scanner for larger libraries.
- quinndupont 5y agoI use Libib as well. It has a blazing fast barcode scanner, though manual entry is a bit cumbersome. They seem like a good company, though longevity might be a concern. There is an easy export option, anyways.
- jeffwask 5y agoDitto, I used Libib for a much smaller library (500 or so) and scanned everything when I moved last month. It was handy because the phone app easily scanned most of my books and I could manually enter the ISBN for those that didn't.
- ravila4 5y agoBarcode Scanner Phone app + Calibre I've used this (Android) barcode scanner before: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sukronmoh.bwi.barcodescanner https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sukronmoh.... On Calibre, simply go to "Add Books" > "Add books by ISBN", and paste a list of ISBNS. It will automatically download metadata and images for them.
- zwayhowder 5y agoYou can also buy a bluetooth barcode scanner that works faster if this is going to be a regular thing. I copied my LT & GoodReads catalogs into Calibre recently to reduce my dependency on third parties. I've been a Calibre user for years but hadn't pulled in all my physical books until recently. I'm very happy with the results.
- AndrewLiptak 5y agoThere was a great bit of free software that I had downloaded a bunch of years ago, LibraryDB, which allowed you to set up your own software. If memory serves, you could hook up a laser scanner and scan the barcode, which would make things pretty easy for you, but I can't seem to find the software online anymore. But to be honest, I've always found cataloging and data entry to be a lot of fun, and there's something meditative about entering a book's title, date, author, ISBN, etc. into a system. I found that it helped me figure out what I have and think about why I'm keeping some books. It also led to some neat discoveries about certain books. I found a couple that had been signed that I'd never realized had been signed!
- winsbe01 5y agoApps like QRBot [1] have the ability to scan ISBNs (and barcodes generally), and have a "history" feature that keeps track of what you've scanned and lets you export (to CSV, among others). The app is free on both iPhone and Android (there is a paid version, don't know what extras it has or if it's just ad-free), but may want to verify how much history gets stored before you go scan-crazy. From a US perspective (may apply elsewhere), for books published relatively recently (within the last ~20 years or so), the ISBN is often part of the barcode on the back of the book (ISBN-13s (the updated standard) start with 978, so this is a good clue that the barcode is an ISBN). For a period of time prior to that (and perhaps still applicable to Mass Market Paperbacks), there is a barcode on the back that is NOT an ISBN, but there is an ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. I've not discovered any systematic way to pull an ISBN out of a non-ISBN barcode (though I haven't dug too far -- my collection hasn't reached 4 digits yet and I've been happy to type when scanning wasn't an option). Once you have the ISBNs, I like to query against the Open Library API [2], which is a part of the Internet Archive. The information in there is fairly robust, if inconsistent (the capitalization of titles is sometimes as printed on the title page, sometimes Library of Congress format, other minor things). They have a lot of data points available, such as cross-referenced IDs with Goodreads and LibraryThing, but again, this is community-supported data, so YMMV as to completeness or accuracy. Another note -- many books have separate ISBNs for hardcover editions, trade paperback editions, mass market editions, eBooks, etc (and sometimes don't have an ISBN at all for things like Book of the Month Club editions). I don't know if this is a requirement, or a luxury that big publishers have, but it is something I've noticed (you'll sometimes see multiple ISBNs listed on the copyright page, along with their formats -- also you may see related editions on Indiebound [3], along with their ISBNs). A cursory glance at Open Library doesn't seem to have a data point distinction for this (which is unfortunate), so you may still have to note this, but theoretically it may be possible to get this information from the ISBN directly at some point. Source for ^^: I read a lot, have a lot of books, briefly ran a (failed) specialized online bookstore, and wrote a CLI tool [4] for myself to solve this very issue. [1]: https://qrbot.net/locale/en/ https://qrbot.net/locale/en/ [2]: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books [3]: https://www.indiebound.org/ https://www.indiebound.org/ [4]: https://github.com/winsbe01/booki https://github.com/winsbe01/booki
- dhosek 5y agoI'll second the recommendation for LibraryThing. I wanted to be able to shelve books by LoC call number and this has a pretty good (although not always complete) lookup for most call numbers (I have learned how to generate a call number for books that don't have them and also discovered that the University of Chicago Library doesn't use the same cutter numbers that the LoC and most other libraries use). LibraryThing's mobile app will scan barcodes just fine. The gotcha is that mass-market paperback before sometime in the 80s (I probably have the date wrong) do not have the ISBN in them. These will need to be entered manually (not to bad with the mobile app which has a dedicated ISBN keyboard). It can also look up by the LOC catalog number (which is not the call number but rather a consecutively assigned number which can be found on the copyright page of books published starting some time in the 1960s). ISBN, by the way, will tell you the format of the book. Paperback and hardcover books have separate ISBNs.
- stonecharioteer 5y ago> ISBN, by the way, will tell you the format of the book. Paperback and hardcover books have separate ISBNs. To add, ISBNs will also tell you the cover of the book. If you have 5 hardcover editions where each has a separate cover image, that's 5 ISBNs. The ISBN corresponds to a specific format of a book, always. Only reprints share an ISBN. And ISBNs also tell you a lot about the book.
- tomjen3 5y agoI did that for about 70 books recently. I purchased a scanner for very little (about 200 dkk, no idea what it would cost in USD), put it in the USB on my laptop and opened a spreadsheet. The handheld scanner automatially "enters" a newline once it has written the ISBN number, so the only thing you have to do is move onto the next book. You can scan books faster than you can pull them out and put them back. Actually getting the book info from the ISBN was very time consuming, I didn't know about Library Thing. You can almost certainly use a smartphone, but that will be a lot slower, comes with the risk of dropping it and then you don't have a bar code scanner left over for other projects.
- undoware 5y agoI had a gig doing this once in grad school. Here's my method. It worked great: First, close the library (or library section) until your work is complete. It's critical that the books not go wandering or get rearranged during this process. Next, grab an SLR (or equivalent mirrorless) camera with video mode. Set it to video mode. In good lighting, play it over the shelves, one by one, from left to right. Slowly. Make sure the spines are all legible. This is your set-of-books. Set yourself or someone else up transcribing the titles from the recording, in the order shelved. Check it a couple of times. If you missed a book, or couldn't read the spine from the recording, add it here. Once you are certain your list is accurate and complete, print (or put on your phone) the list of books. (Still in the order shelved.) Now, again, working top-down, left-to-right, take books out in sets of eight. (I like eight because it's a nice round number, it's near miller's magic number, and it's also a number of books I can typically carry.) For each 'byte' of eight books, take your SLR and, in photo mode, take a pic of the frontmatter page of that book -- the one containing the date of publication, and, most critically, the ISBN. Put the eight books back on the shelf and take another eight. Repeat until complete. Be sure not to miss a book. Now you have a list of books and a set of pics. Guess what? They are the same length and in the same order. So, book 1 on your list is the first pic on your SLR. And so on. Now, you can OCR those pics for the ISBN. As backup/redundancy you can grab other info as well, e.g. publisher, etc. to sanity-check the results of your ISBN lookup. Congratulations, you now have enough information -- a title and and ISBN -- for e.g. Google Books to pull up the rest of the info, which you can sanity check against the other deets you OCRed out of the frontmatter page. Final tip: Calibre has a book information lookup thingy; it wasn't what I used back in the day, but AFAIK it should work great. It may be possible for you to simply populate the Calibre book list with titles and ISBNs, and have it just magically whisk other details -- date of publication etc. -- into the appropriate fields. Again, you can cross-check these (either exhaustively or spot-check) against the OCRed contents of the frontmatter pages, which (again) you associated with a book title in the initial step. Happy librarianing!
- DiggyJohnson 5y agoThis is a wonderful comment that juxtaposes any suggestion that requires buying a scanner. That said, I wonder if this works at the scale that OPs kid will be tasked with?
- throwaway2214 5y agoyou can write something with https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/ https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/ I used it in the past, with few tweaks it is very accurate. and then you can query goodreads or amazon to find the actual book
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NotAnOtter 5y agoYou definitely want to pick up a handheld bar code scanner and dump all the data into a csv. From there it would take a few hours of playing with the data to get it in whichever form you prefer
- poxwole 5y agoI have a few thousand books myself so I wrote this. https://github.com/konsbn/xlibris https://github.com/konsbn/xlibris this is almost exactly what you want
- quercusa 5y agoMy family has used ReaderWare for years. It's got smart cataloging across multiple sources (including LoC for old books w/o an ISBN) and runs on a number of platforms. We use an old USB CueCat. https://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_details https://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_...
- chubot 5y agoHonest question: what’s the benefit of cataloguing books? I’m surprised so many people do it. I have 3 tall bookshelves of books but don’t really feel the need to catalogue them. I sort them by topic and sometimes physical size and it seems fine.
- daggersandscars 5y agoWhen I had ~1000 books, I catalogued them to avoid buying books I already had and to ease lending them to my friends. Back in the pre-smart phone days, there was a Mac app that used a webcam to scan book barcodes. The author wrote a neat article on how it was better to scan barcodes really fast and throw away the noise than to try to scan the barcode perfectly the first time.
- mindcrime 5y agoI can think of three or four good reasons: 1. To prevent buying duplicates. I own enough books (on the order of thousands) that I can't remember all the ones I own, and occasionally buy something only later to discover that I just bought a 2nd (or 3rd) copy. 2. Insurance purposes. If I had a fire or something I imagine I might need the catalog, photos, etc. as part of my claim process. 3. Related to (2), but if I had to replace a substantial portion of my library, it would help if I had the items in the library cataloged. 4. Locating books. I have enough books jammed into my apartment that I sometimes struggle to locate a particular one. Or even remember if I own a particular title at all or not (see (1) above). A catalog, with notes like "In living room, on bookcase A, shelf 2" or "in office, bookcase Q, shelf 4" would be a huge benefit at times. Even more so for the handful that would fall into the "Boxed up and moved to storage locker on 08/16/2019. Box labeled BR549" category or whatever. I have 3 tall bookshelves of books but don’t really feel the need to catalogue them Well sure. If I only had 3 bookcases of books I don't know if I'd bother either. But when you get into the multiple thousands of books, it becomes more important.
- gjm11 5y agoMy main reason is the same as mindcrime's and daggersandcars's: I found that every now and then I'd buy books I'd forgotten I already had, and it was annoying. At one point I thought there would be value in recording where in the house each book was, but it soon became obvious that there wasn't so I stopped. If space considerations required some of them to be in boxes, it would become valuable again. (I do tag each book with what it's about, and shelve things by subject, so in some ambiguous cases the catalogue might be useful for finding books. Hardly ever has been, though.) It's occasionally useful when I know there was a book with such-and-such in the title but can't remember the author or the exact title (though not very useful since usually in such cases it's also possible to find the relevant shelf and browse until I find it. But you can't grep a bookcase.) And if I didn't have a list I'd wonder every now and then how many books are actually in the house, and waste time estimating. As mindcrime says, this isn't something that has much value for a few bookcases of books, but the value increases as the number of books grows.
- rbobby 5y agoBuy a cheap hand held battery operated wireless barcode scanner (cheap on AliExpress). These work really well for scanning stacks of books... pick the book up, zap, put the book down. You have to config the scanner to operate in "keyboard" mode or some such... basically what you scan gets typed as if from a keyboard. I used a simple Excel macro for data capture and lookup. Basically when a cell changed (book was scanned) it would request the book data from outpan.com. If outpan didn't know the upc beep and return to the cell, otherwise decode the response (json) and populate the spreadsheet row. Here's the excel macro (why I used the B column instead of the A column is a longer story): Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range) If Target.Cells.Count <> 1 Then Exit Sub End If If Application.Intersect(Range("B2:B99999"), Range(Target.Address)) Is Nothing Then Exit Sub End If Dim Ean Ean = CStr(Target.value) Dim Url Url = "https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/" + Ean + "?apikey=[haha get your own key haha]" Dim HttpRequest Set HttpRequest = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") HttpRequest.Open "GET", Url, False HttpRequest.Send Set json = New VbsJson Set o = json.Decode(HttpRequest.ResponseText) If Not IsEmpty(o("error")) Then Beep ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select Else booktitle = o("name") If IsNull(booktitle) Then Beep ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select Else If IsVarArrayEmpty(o("attributes")) Then Author = "" PublishedOn = "" Else If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Author(s)")) Then Author = "" Else Author = o("attributes")("Author(s)") End If If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Publication Date")) Then PublishedOn = "" Else PublishedOn = o("attributes")("Publication Date") End If End If Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column - 1).value = Cells(Target.Row - 1, Target.Column - 1).value Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 1).value = booktitle Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 2).value = Author Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 3).value = PublishedOn End If End If End Sub Function IsVarArrayEmpty(anArray As Variant) Dim i As Integer If IsObject(anArray) Then IsVarArrayEmpty = False Else On Error Resume Next i = UBound(anArray, 1) If Err.Number = 0 Then If i < 0 Then IsVarArrayEmpty = True Else IsVarArrayEmpty = False End If Else IsVarArrayEmpty = True End If End If End Function edit: you will need VbsJson from http://demon.tw/my-work/vbs-json.html http://demon.tw/my-work/vbs-json.html (why that's a chinese page I don't know all I know was it was a single file json parser that was easy to work with for this). edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.
- silicon2401 5y agosimilar question, is there a good way to do this for video games? I probably have a couple hundred physical games and would loves to not have to manually build a spreadsheet of them
- tom-thistime 5y agoThe bar code scanner idea (already mentioned by several people) is even better than it sounds. Almost magically good. Much, much better than manual entry.
- adamnemecek 5y agoI'm interested in using RFID tags to help me locate my books. Does anyone do this?
- anfractuosity 5y agoI used this android app to scan the ISBNs of my books - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eleybourn.bookcatalogue https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eleybourn.... It's OSS: https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue From what I recall it also pulls additional info about the book from online.
- tantalor 5y agoDonate them to a library. Then come back later after the librarian has cataloged them.
- bluGill 5y agoMost books donated to a library to to the yearly book sale without being cataloged. What doesn't sell goes to goodwill similar thrift stores.
- Dopameaner 5y agoI am awed that you have a couple of thousand physical books. 1) How long did it take for you to collect all of them? 2) What are the books mostly centered on? tech? polticis? fiction? 3) Do you happen to know whats your read? and to be read stat?
- gjm11 5y agoI'm not OP, but I also have thousands of books (a little over 4100 at last count), so I guess my answers might be of interest. 1. I'm about 50 years old. (The furthest back my records go is 2004, when I was about 35 and the count was about 2300.) 2. Of the 4100 books in my catalogue (it's a CSV file, very high-tech), 1233 are fiction. Rough counts for some non-fiction subject areas: science 520, mathematics 420, philosophy 250, computing 220. Others with substantial numbers: religion 270 (I'm not religious, but I used to be and my wife still is), humour 240, history 210, children's books 180 (may be wrong; we don't always bother to record these and sometimes we get rid of them since children grow), reference works 110 (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc.), music 100, puzzles 100, poetry 100, language 100, books of essays 100, cookery 100 (these are mostly actual cookery books, which maybe don't really belong in the same list), biography 90, literature 90 (meaning literary criticism, books about books, that sort of thing; actual works of literature are mostly under "fiction"), politics 80, autobiography 75 ("biography" earlier excludes these), games 65 (this is things like chess books, not books that are somehow also games), education 65. 3. I think about 10% of the books are unread at any given time.
- asymptosis 5y agoI've also got a couple of thousand. I already had about a thousand by my early 20s. I was an avid reader as a kid. I'm in my 40s now. I still like to read, but there are so many more distractions these days compared to 20 years ago. So, the rate of book acquisition has slowed down. When I was a kid, I read a couple of books per week. (And not just YA, I've been reading adult-level books since I was 10.) My library is about a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction. I like speculative fiction (scifi/horror/fantasy and their intermixings such as weird fiction), with a smaller percentage made up of thrillers, comedy, dramas, and classic literature such as you might cover in an undergrad English Lit degree. The non-fiction covers just about everything: physics, biology, mathematics, philosophy, history, the arts, finance, computing, politics, religion and the occult, and roleplaying game rulebooks. (Well, maybe rpgs are fiction, but it feels like non-fiction because they are more for rules reference than because of the great prose inside.) I've read almost all the fiction, except for about a dozen in a pile which I'm still working through (I did a bulk buy last year and it's taking time.) The percentage of unread non-fiction is a bit higher, mainly because I don't have as much patience/time as when I was younger. It's a lot easier to set aside an hour for fiction before going to sleep at night; reading non-fiction at that time would just give me insomnia.
- 101008 5y agoISBN are different for paperback and hardcovers, even for the same title, so you should be able to get that info from the ISBN :)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yldreader 5y agoAnother vote for LibraryThing.com and a barcode reader or smartphone. I scanned in ~1100 books, and only ran into 15-20 without ISBNs. All but 3-4 of those were easily input by title. But I like it because its very easy to keep up, and isn't a moneygrubbing advertising/tracking site like Goodreads. The phone app is very handy when wandering in bookstores-- easy to check if you own such and such a title.
- nsm 5y agoI cobbled together something similar using a couple of javascript libraries. It is a really simple web-app that you can open on any phone, and it uses the phone camera to scan the barcode. It saves the results to a Google Sheets (what I wanted). The code is public, mostly because I couldn't bring myself to clean it up. If you are interested, I could make it public. I wrote about it at https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/tracking-books-i-read-using-svelte-xstate-quagga/ https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/tracking-books-i-read-using-...
- xyzzy21 5y agoHonestly? I have about 5,000 books. I just sat down with a spreadsheet and entered the particulars for every one like any librarian in existence over the last 2000 years would do. I did this over a few months with 1-8 hours of effort in a burst. A lot of things still have no quick and automated solution. When I'm doing accounting and financial analysis, it's still primarily a numbers grind of data entry, cross checking and analysis.
- hoten 5y agoLibrarians use bar code scanners today, not spreadsheets.
- danielam 5y agoThe two are not mutually exclusive. For example, I use a very simple barcode scanning app[0] that exports to CSV. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reading-list-book-tracker/id1217139955 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reading-list-book-tracker/id12...
- pixel_tracing 5y agoYou should ask Ancestry.com how they catalog hundreds of thousands of records… Hint: it’s not manual and it’s completely automated.
- ripperdoc 5y agoI'm not sure of the value for me to catalog all books just for the titles. What I would like is whenever I search Google, it would also search my books and tell me which book to open. It feels like a lot of knowledge sits on my shelves that I'm not really using. Not sure if that exists, but obviously the hard part is getting access to full-text contents of books - scanning pages by myself would be extremely time consuming.
- lawrenceyan 5y agoAs an interesting anecdote, the history of book digitization and its implications in fair use / copyright in regards to what you're trying to do is actually pretty storied (primarily litigated between Google and the Authors Guild over the course of the past decade).[0] [0] - https://cdlib.org/services/pad/massdig/mass-digitization-history/ https://cdlib.org/services/pad/massdig/mass-digitization-his...
- spaztastical 5y agoI have been searching around off and on. I found a HN thread for years ago too! It seems that people have favourites but there is nothing leading the charge. I know someone that has a barcode reader and wrote ee's own code to parse it for a database, even printing personal barcodes to handle repeats (sentimental value, different format). I think ISBNs sometimes are different soft vs hard, BUT ISBNs are new and sometimes get reused, plus the barcode might be for a category or "book/zine of series" and not a particular copy. I know Amazon, and thus goodreads, can now do search by cover - it is amazon, but it does avoid a lot of issues. Goodreads might be best for you just for phone and cover scanning. It is, however, slow. You can use shelves/tags for locations but it is ... slow. I think the best system would be a combo of cover scanning, cataloging your photo in the entry, and notes of signed/writen notes. BUT for location tying it to a barcode reader that can scan the new shelf's barcode and the book, but that requires personally barcoding books (please use removable stickers!) and is a bit over involved. Personally, the weird case I really want and am not sure how to peice together is a way to pull good spine photos/digitals. I know mu books by spine so I'd love to see if a book catalog could have a spine database and be used to make a virtual library. edit: Found the thread. Last I read it did not have anything particularly good, but a few workable options. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817219
- cratermoon 5y agoInstead of spending money on hardware and software that will be flakey, time-consuming, and error-prone, put the money to good use. Call up the nearest college or university with a library science program. Ask them for the names of students specializing in curation and cataloging. Contacts the students and tell them how much money you have, how many books you want to catalog, and arrange for them to take care of it.
- 1123581321 5y agoThey’re going to want to know how you want to store the information and how you plan to use it in the future.
- cratermoon 5y agoYes, and an MLS student will know what questions to ask and how to assess a good solution. Plus, if you have 2000+ books, you may have the makings of a collection with titles or editions a library would appreciate as a gift or bequest. If it's already cataloged according to ALA conventions, that makes the gift much more attractive.
- 1123581321 5y agoSo no different than this thread, then.
- RheingoldRiver 5y agoSeconding this. "How to catalog all my books" is a decidedly nontrivial problem that people literally make the concentration of their masters' degrees (MLIS). The advice will depend based on the type of catalog you are likely to have, and you'll probably get asked questions you didn't even know you should be answering. This will also be legitimately valuable experience for someone who can't get an internship at a real library (not enough slots/demand) and needs something to put on their resume. (If you had a budget of $0 you could possibly get someone to do it for free even, but don't do that.)
- spaztastical 5y agoThis might have some ideas, but it looked like no particularly good solutions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817219
- _moof 5y agoHow about this: 1. Make a snapshot of a secondhand book store's online inventory. 2. Sell all the books to them. 3. Diff the inventory. 4. Buy them all back. Voila!
- reilly3000 5y agoI have a lovely $5 USB barcode scanner that was pulled from an old time clock system. It’s fast, simple, and acts as a keyboard. That plus Calibre would be good, but a spreadsheet would work just fine too.
- deknos 5y agoisbn scanner and tellico, i did this. you can add databases to tellico to ask for your book and it will add the info to your local database.
- marzetti 5y ago'My Library' by Julien Keith, is great for Android users... Over 1m downloads and 4.6 star average... My own library is only about 600 odd books, but it was easy to use, interesting, and great now it's done!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mattowen_uk 5y agoI don't have the code to hand at the moment, but when my partner and I catalogued all our fiction books (over 2,000) I discovered that you can search Amazon via ISBN, so the workflow was: 1. Scan book ISBN via a standard barcode reader (in keyboard emulation mode) [1] 2. The barcode reader 'types' in the ISBN into the GUI of my homebrew app along with a new-line character. 3. The app takes this ISBN and searches Amazon via it's API, then parses the results. If there's more than 1 result it just picks the first one (which is 99% correct), if it's not correct there's an option to override or enter details manually. 4. The app then queries the amazon API again for the book details, and places them all into a record in a SQL DB. 5. For reasons I can't quite remember the app also goes to the actual product page of the book on Amazon and grabs the high resolution picture of the book cover (which only some times matches the edition of the book we actually own) and stores that locally. 6. There's a web app for searching the DB that we use when we can't remember which books we actually own (first world problems!) 7. Any new book that enters the house is catalogued BEFORE it is even allowed in the Library. It's a basic set-up, but other than the Amazon API, which is abstracted via my own functions, it's not dependant on any other (closed or FOSS) book management software. --- [1] A cheap one like this will do it: https://amzn.to/3CyqaAC https://amzn.to/3CyqaAC
- thorin 5y agoThat sounds like a good approach. I guess you could just a smartphone app to avoid buying a scanner e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gamma.scan&hl=en_GB&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gamma.scan... I guess the experience might be smoother with a dedicated scanner though.
- spaztastical 5y agoDo you have a git page on this? This sounds impressive, above what I can do right now.
- rekabis 5y agoI’ve been using BookCrawler (iOS) for the last decade-plus to keep track of what I get (to avoid accidentally purchasing multiple copies), but I’ve discovered that at around 3,000 entries both the search functionality as well as all internal stats suddenly took a vicious and permanent dirt nap, and never recovered. This threshold was reached a few years ago, so who knows how many books I have now. Everything else in that app works spectacularly fine, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯