Day 15: Today's Pick — A Quietly Brilliant App for Cataloging Your Bookshelf

I have, in the past two years, bought four duplicate copies of books I already owned. Two were paperbacks of titles I had in hardcover. Two were "different editions" I forgot I owned. The cumulative cost was probably $80.

So I cataloged my bookshelf. With the help of an app called Libib, the entire job took an afternoon.

What Libib is

A free (with paid upgrade) app for cataloging books, movies, music, and games. Open the app. Tap "Add." Point your phone camera at a book's ISBN barcode. The app pulls the cover, title, author, year, edition, and a description. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It takes about three seconds per book.

I scanned 217 books in approximately two hours.

What you do with the catalog

A few useful things, in order of how much I actually use them:

1. Search. "Did I already buy Dune? Yes." Browse the app, see the book, don't buy a duplicate. This alone has paid for the upgrade.
2. Tag. I tagged everything by genre, by "to read," by "lent out," by "owned in PDF too," etc. The tag system is flexible and fast.
3. Lend tracking. Mark a book as lent to a person. Get a reminder. Get the book back. (This is the clunky part — it works but feels like a 2014 web app.)
4. Wishlist. Add things you want to own. When you find one in a used bookstore, check the wishlist first. (Useful for me; I am the kind of person who has a "books to look for" mental list.)

What the upgrade gets you

$9/year removes the 100-item cap, removes ads, gives you cloud backup, and lets you build multiple libraries (e.g., books, movies, board games as separate catalogs). $9/year is fair. The free tier is fine for casual use.

What it doesn't do

It is not Goodreads. It does not have a social-feed component. It does not recommend books. It does not have a public reading log that anyone else can see. It is a single-purpose tool: a database of what you own, with a fast input mechanism.

This is, mostly, a feature. The entire reason I switched to Libib from a half-finished Goodreads catalog is that Libib doesn't try to be anything else. It's just a list. Lists are good.

The barcode-scan question

This is the moment-of-truth feature for any cataloging app, and Libib's scanner is genuinely good. It works on:

• New paperback ISBNs (instantly)
• Old paperback ISBNs printed on yellowing paper (instantly)
• Paperback ISBNs printed in 9pt type on a thin curve (slower, but yes)
• Library-stamped ISBNs (sometimes; old paperbacks fail occasionally)

For the ~5% of books where the barcode won't scan, you type the ISBN. The app pulls the metadata anyway. Fast.

What I'd add

A "purchase price" field. A "lend due date" field. A "year I read it" field. Libib is constantly adding features, so I'm hopeful.

Tomorrow: a small Italian olive oil that ruined every other olive oil for me.