[Drou]

@Mook4Nook I very recently discovered Libib. I have around 1k unread ebooks sitting in a file on my laptop with the book title and author and that's it. Not the best system for finding my next read, especially when I can't remember what the book's about! So I finally decided I had to spend some proper time cataloguing them. I didn't really know of any websites other than goodreads and storygraph. Goodreads was a hard no and storygraph I like for book suggestions but prefer to keep it for that only. Came across an article which suggested Libib and Librarything. The latter seems far more popular but I took one look at it and was reminded too much of goodreads. Plus, it seems to be quite community based - not a bad thing but not what I was looking for. I literally just wanted somewhere I could have a catalogue of my books that would show me a cover and a description. I don't care about tracking my reads or setting goals or anything else. (Also, if anyone is wondering about why not use Calibre, I like Calibre but I don't find it intuitive, I did not want to upload every single ebook I own to Calibre so that I could catalogue it, and unless you scroll through all the books and select each one, one by one, you cannot see a cover or description so is too time consuming.)

Libib is perfect for my needs. It has a clean, simple but still sophisticated looking interface, you can choose to view books in a few ways (a list of titles and author, just the book cover so a book case view, or one book per line with cover and all info such as description etc.). You can still have up to 5k books on the free version and you can create different libraries or shelves I guess some websites would call them (I don't think there is a limit on the number of libraries you can have, just the number of books). Under each book you can edit all info except ISBN if you add a book from a Libib search. (If you manually add a book you can edit ISBN info.) The info you can add and edit are the book cover, the book title, the author and there is a description box but no reason you can't add your own info. However, you can also add tags, your own notes, and you can add a book to a group (series) so that all those books will stay grouped together if you ever want to sort by book title rather than author. You can add a rating (5 stars including half stars) and a status (not begun, in progress, abandoned, completed, along with date begun and date finished if those matter to you) and your own review.

As I had no catalogue already set up I basically had to add every single book from scratch. The easiest way for me to do this was to just go to a decent bookshop website (mostly Waterstones in my case but I did also make use of amazon and goodreads), copy the name of the book from the file, find book in Waterstones, copy ISBN into Libib and book is added automatically. I also edited a lot of the descriptions as I added each book as I didn't want 2 paras of gushing reviews before I even got to a brief blurb. Some did need a cover uploading but I just right clicked on the Waterstones cover, saved as image and uploaded to Libib - took 10 secs max. It took me about 5 nights to add them all, it's time consuming but a bit mindless, I just sat in front of the tv while I was doing it though and it passed the time. The one criticism I do have though is that you cannot search a book using ASIN, only ISBN, so a couple of titles I have that were only released as ebooks had to be manually entered.

You can import a CSV file though if you have one (I'm not sure how successfully as I did not use this feature) and you can also export your libraries as a CSV file too. Your libraries can be published if you want to share them with friends (people do need to specifically look for you though either with your name or username, you can't just browse randomly) or remain unpublished and is easy enough to change from one status to the other in settings. Mine are unpublished but if you want to have a look at one of my libraries to get a better idea, I'm happy to publish one and post a link for you.

ETA: I do not have the app, I've only used the website on my laptop so I'm not sure about scanning ISBN rather than inputting but the description on google play says it does scan.