Cataloging My Books

I’ve been trying out various book tracking/inventory apps on and off for months - truly the time period probably spanned a year or more. The desire to figure this out ebbed and flowed depending on what I had going on and how much energy I had at the end of each day. Dear readers, I rarely had energy to do more than veg out at night. The lack of order to my books was a problem but it wasn’t a crisis. After almost three years of living with the disordered books I finally decided December 2024 was going to be the month to tackle this long neglected task.

I used to use Delicious Library but that’s no longer supported so I had to go looking for something else. That’s a quick summary of a problem I attempted to solve for many months. I reinstalled the app, I tried to email app support when that didn’t work. That went nowhere, clearly, once I realized that the app developers had moved on and were no longer supporting the program.

I Googled “best book inventory apps” and found reviews for several options, ranging from free to not free and very expensive. I didn’t want to pony up to much money on something that I wasn’t sure would work so I opted to download the free options.

I eventually went with Book Buddy. Library Thing seems to do a slightly better job at identifying books which you’d think would have put it ahead. However BookBuddy automatically assigns genres and I find that more helpful in the long run.

Before I tackled the actually inventorying of the books, I moved some bookcases and storage carts around. Now all of my books will live in the living room instead of being scattered about. It’s not a big apartment so giving all the books space within one living area takes up space but there’s something quite satisfying in being able to see every book I own with a glance. I’m determined to at least scan/enter all the books before the end of the year. I’ll leave the organizing for another day. This is what passes for exciting around here and I’m okay with that.

Posted on 12/29/2024 | 0 comments |