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We have a problem. Our family reads. We have lots of books. And they haven't been well-organized. We have run out of storage space. So it's time to get organized. Here's the result. 1/
We are a family of readers. We have somewhere north of 1000 books in our house, and they haven't been well-organized. We have an assortment of bookshelves, which have loosely been organized by which person originally bought the book.... but not well.
So, decision number 1 was: how are we going to organize them? Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification (LCC)? I went with #LCC because we tend to have a lot on certain topics (eg, Kansas history), and it is great with that. 2/
Then, how to track? I wound up using #LibraryThing. It integrates with the Library of Congress and other libraries, plus Amazon, for pulling in metadata. Its site is designed to work well with barcode scanners (I found the Honeywell 1900G-HD works really well). It also has CSV and JSON exports, plus CSV imports. I can also add all my books from local authors that aren't in any database, etc. 3/
@jgoerzen never heard of librarything; is it an online service letting you build your own lists? i was hoping for smth local with a base that could be sync'ed between myvown machines, but capable of pulling book info from… places.
anyways, will research it later today. thank you!
@tivasyk Yes, I too would have preferred something local, but I didn't find any such thing. But, at least they let me do a full export of absolutely everything in my account in two useful formats, so I figure I at least have a local backup I can resort to if something happens at LT. They seem to be a small company doing good things, so that's good.
@jgoerzen i completely see your point! i've been looking for a similar solution as you, albeit the size of my problem (or library) is much smaller.
still, i don't think i'll go the librarything way :-( for me, centralisation, partial ownership by amazon and no safeguards against eventual sellout are red flags.
as primitive as trying to replicate it with #openlibrary lists looks at the moment, i'll rather try that one.
still, thank you for bringing this up!
@tivasyk You might be thinking of #Goodreads with that sellout to Amazon. I migrated my data from Goodreads to #LibraryThing because I had long been uncomfortable with that at Goodreads. Also, while LibraryThing does have social aspects, it is far stronger at organizing and managing your own collection.
I looked into #Bookwyrm, which is a Fediverse project. But it was far more about social than organizing, and wouldn't have helped with my project.
@jgoerzen the wikipedia article tells us the librarything is partly owned by amazon; i don't know if that is true.
when i think about possible sellouts, that means anything privately owned can be bought and sold… unlike structures like archive.org (behind openlibrary) or bookwyrm. again, i don't know for real.
i have a bookwyrm profile, but you're right, it's not nearly (or at all) fitting the bill of cataloguing :-(
@tivasyk Ahh, got it. Yeah, AbeBooks owns 40% of LT, and Amazon now owns AbeBooks. I haven't seen any Amazon influence on the site, though -- different from Goodreads. LT seems to be evolving at a slightly faster pace than Goodreads, which I guess is somewhat amazing considering that Goodreads is an Amazon unit now. OTOH, I do take frequent exports of my data.
Anyhow, I think you and I are in full agreement. I'd rather host locally. LT has its warts, but I haven't found anything better yet.
