[sglinert]

A couple of days ago, I was looking for a book on Amazon. I checked my collection in Calibre, and it wasn't there, so I bought it.

Um, the book was only available in paper, and my Calibre library shows only my ebooks...but I am so used to ebooks that I sort of forgot that I own thousands of paper ones, as well. The title seemed familiar, so I went to my wooden bookshelves and discovered I actually had a paper copy already.

And this lead me to think about entering my paper books in Calibre so I would never make the same mistake again. This is what I did.

I have a iPod Touch, so I cruised through the barcode readers and found an app called Barcode Collector. It takes a photo of the barcodes and then creates a list of them, which I then mailed to myself.

I copied the list, opened Calibre, clicked Add Books, clicked Add from ISBN, pasted the list into the text box, and assigned a default Paper tag. Then I downloaded the metadata.

I now have a way to enter all my paper books into Calibre so hopefully, I will now have a truly complete catalog of all my books, regardless of whether they are paper or electronic.