… are in my personal library, yay!

I had been meaning to digitally catalog my book collection for some time now. I have on several occasions found books at used bookstores that I wasn’t sure whether or not I owned yet (typically books in a series or books by prolific authors). So I finally used a free app called Libib to digitally catalog the books I own (not including eBooks at the moment; I only have perhaps a dozen of those). Next time I am wondering the shelves of a used bookstore, I can now search the app to be sure of what I have and what I don’t. Even while cataloging the books, I found a few books to weed out because I have multiple copies of them.

You can scroll through my library here: https://shannifin.libib.com/

(Unfortunately there does not yet seem to be a way to sort the public listing in any other way besides by title.)

I get a majority of books used, and have walked away with some big loads for cheap prices when stores are going out of business or getting rid of excess. I’m sure I still spend too much money on books considering my slow reading speed, but they’re addicting to collect, aren’t they?

I’ve only read around 10% of these books. Of course, some books are more for reference and not really meant to be read from front to back anyway. Still, with my current reading speed, I will likely die with the majority of these books left unread. Which is fine, because upon death I will have access to infinite knowledge… I hope.

Anyway, if you’re a book lover or collector and wish to digitize a record of your catalog, Libib is the best free app (for Android) I’ve come across so far. It also allows you to export a CSV file, which is handy.

Categories: Technology

5 Comments

Scott · March 27, 2018 at 10:27 PM

My library was 1601 physical books last time I added anything to the catalog (about 4 years and way more than 200 books ago). It also includes 2,350 ebooks (much smaller than my current library) and 441 audiobooks (maybe a half dozen are not yet included right now…).

This app seems more promising than maintaining my excel files of books though, so I may redo my catalog….

Scott · March 27, 2018 at 10:33 PM

And oh god… the amount of manga I have isn’t even included anywhere on my catalog…. I may literally have thousands more books and ebooks than I just stated….

S P Hannifin · March 28, 2018 at 2:51 PM

Nice! You’ve got me beat… I’m sure I’ll catch up someday… or not. If you ever put your catalog online, I’d be interested to scroll through it.

Also, where did you get so many ebooks from? Do you buy them or get them free? Just curious, because from an author perspective, I see tons of writers that do free promotional giveaways, but I suspect the majority of their downloaders never actually read them.

Scott · March 28, 2018 at 3:27 PM

A lot of my ebooks are public domain (like Alice in Wonderland, etc.), or instructional (which I find free every now and then). I have a handful of kindle ebooks that I have bought, but usually when they are too short or too obscure to find in physical copy. But there’s a large swatch of all kinds of things (Literature, Science, Science Fiction, Fantasy, History, Social Science, Philosophy, Language Resources, Reference, etc.). I’ve had them for a while though, so I don’t really remember the provenance of each and every one of them.

I’ve wanted online access to my library catalog for a while now, so it may be a project for me at some point. But right now, I’m working on preparing everything for my much-desired home NAS system. But that project keeps ballooning in size (and price….ugh.), so I’m not sure when it will become reality either. (I was hoping to get a 5-disc NAS with all 5 10TB hard drives, but it’s becoming clear that it’ll probably need to be 8 (or even 10) hard drives of that size to future-proof it… and maybe to create RAID redundancies, which I hadn’t really planned on using). As you can imagine, the price tag is becoming prohibitive…

S P Hannifin · March 29, 2018 at 11:03 PM

Ah, collecting public domain ebooks is not a bad idea… where do you get them from? Gutenberg or Internet Archive or do you know of other good places?

Setting up an NAS system sounds like a fun project (if you can afford it), though I know absolutely nothing about that sort of stuff. Would you use that for storing video data? I don’t think I’d have any need for one, but sounds interesting nonetheless.

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