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.

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

My dream really is the Home Depot Scanner, because that thing is stupidly satisfying

Most importantly for me, Librarything lets you add books that do not have an ISBN, unlike every one of their competitors I've tried. Nearly 20% of my books are too old to have an ISBN, so that's pretty important to me.

[0] https://www.librarycat.org/lib/ddrucker [1] https://www.librarything.com/profile/ddrucker

Thanks for indulging my curiosity. Cheers!

edit: I don't own any but regret not buying one good collection recently for cheap, but it would have taken a considerable amount of space on the bookshelf. There's definitely difference in occasionally looking through physical book, the digital ones don't offer the same joy :-)

"Home/Bedroom1/Bookshelf2/shelf3"

I've seen this in some databases that store tree structures.

I spent a lot of time in libraries over the years, especially as a kid, and being surrounded by books just does something.

Now libraries feel more like hangout places where kids vape and talk on the phone.

To be surrounded by books, in your own peaceful place, sounds like pure bliss.

To be surrounded by books of your own choosing is nice. It doesn't have to be a lot though. Just having a stack of nice books near your bed that you like or believe you will like is usually enough.

I am a firm believer in tsundoku.

These are ways to acquire books, but maybe not quality or good condition. Another option is Half Price Books sells "books by the foot" like old encyclopedias or law books for aesthetic value.

I'd have never thought of any of these. I just feel like the older I get the more precious books and knowledge become. Like if there's anything at all worth collecting it's books.

I can't believe books are sold by the foot now! I used to save money from doing odd jobs to get encyclopedia Britannica volumes as a kid, those and the Wildlife Treasury Series. When I got a bit older those damn Scholastic catalogs got me too! XD

[1] http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm#usb

[2] https://blog.librarything.com/2006/10/librarything-does-cuec...

I found it impossible to maintain though. From time to time I'd cull the physical books, but not update the library. Now it's just some books that I used to own.

I've used this (Android) barcode scanner before: 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.

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.

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_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.

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.

On the other hand, eBay listings for books are usually made for a specific item, complete with pictures of the actual item. It was obvious that the listing was for the real thing.

Actually, as far as I see [0] ISBN have to be unique. It seems like this "South End Press" is more of a case of a publisher going rogue than anything els.

[0] https://www.isbn-international.org/content/isbn-assignment (see the '“Out of print” editions' bullet)

https://www.quora.com/Is-every-book-has-a-unique-isbn-If-yes...

points out the non-uniqueness of ISBNs. I used to work in the IT department of a major university library and it was a problem that the librarians were aware of.

It takes exactly one "rouge" publisher to make a problem. (Funny I used to know the people at South End Press)

Do you have any idea how many cases there are of reuse? Is it actually common?

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/style/dan-brown-advice-bo...

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.

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.

It's OSS: https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue

From what I recall it also pulls additional info about the book from online.

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!

(Unrelatedly I also had a gig OCRing books for someone with a visual disability, which is where I got the idea.)

Today I work in the AI division of a major tech company and I can say with some confidence that you could absolutely OCR spines if your OCR platform is new enough :3

(also, why is this on-topic, strictly-procedural comment I spent 30 minutes writing downvoted? Hacker news, you are fickle)

I don't see it here, but even accepting the need to barcode/isbn all the books, I would like a way to pull digitized or high-quality spine images for a VR library that is fed from an ISBN database of what you want it stocked with, using a query for shelving/sorting. I fear that this is a whole new project, akin to the original good cover scans, but lacking even a starting point from publisher sites.

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!

[1] https://www.libib.com

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.

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.)

Turns out it's a major pain to figure out what class some books belong in. Newer books from major publishers have LoC cataloging-in-publication data, which is handy, but the older the book the less likely it is to have that, and if it's from a small publishing house or independently published, someone has to decide what catalog.

Considering just the time involved, I wouldn't ask anyone to do it for free, and MLIS degree programs aren't cheap!

ETA: turns out it's pretty common for folks with the means to hire grad students as interns and freelancers. Some universities will have programs devoted to connecting students with opportunities, even, although at that point you'll be dealing with official contracts and pay rates, which may not work.

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.

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.

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/id12...

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.

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

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

I guess the experience might be smoother with a dedicated scanner though.

https://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_...

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?

Downloads reference Big Sur (Nov 2020).

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.

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.

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.

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.

It also needs a way to pull spine images or have a computer go from bad spine pics to simplified colour-matching digital ones.

Other options - finding when you have a room with books from multiple homes (blended families, inherited), insurance, or for a "why is book 7 of the series here" massive sorting project with a good audiobook for company.

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.

[0] - https://cdlib.org/services/pad/massdig/mass-digitization-his...

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)_/¯

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.

Disclaimer: I made the app. Happy to give free promo codes to anyone interested in trying and give feedback!

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

edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.

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?

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.

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.

From there it would take a few hours of playing with the data to get it in whichever form you prefer

and then you can query goodreads or amazon to find the actual book

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!

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/ [2]: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books [3]: https://www.indiebound.org/ [4]: https://github.com/winsbe01/booki

Hint: it’s not manual and it’s completely automated.