The other day I got curious ... how many books do I actually own?




I didn't want to just count them and forget about the total - or the titles. So, I decided to find an app that would allow me to scan my books in by reading the barcodes. I could have used GoodReads, but I didn't want to stop and rate every book as I scanned it. Then I remembered that a few days or a week before I had randomly seen someone talking about LibraryThing.

LibraryThing allowed me to not only scan my books into the app, but also manually input ISBNs of the books that don't have barcodes on them (for whatever reason) - a lot of the older books in my collection don't have them because they are just that, old. Barcodes didn't exist when these books hit the printers. A few of my books belonged to my parents or are secondhand and were printed in the 1950s and 60s.

I was also able to log into LibraryThing on my computer and sort my books into categories of my choice, so I sorted them by genre. Anything I found that I knew was definitely a book I had bought or that was bought for me - from beloved children's books to bibles, novels and recipe books - I scanned them all.

So, you're probably wondering exactly how many books are actually on my bookshelf.

The Grand Total:  585 books 

I did find some other books hiding under my bed that I am yet to scan in, so you may add another 10 to that number.

A final note:

Something else I discovered you can do with both LibraryThing and GoodReads (as well as other apps that I haven't tried) is transfer your books between apps. I have found GoodReads to be a bit buggy in that it won't accept all of the books that I have attempted to transfer/copy in from LibraryThing.

Which app do I prefer?

I like both of these apps for different reasons, LibraryThing for its ease of scanning (I have not used every element of the app) and GoodReads for its community.

Check them both out, see what you think! Do you have more books than me?




I was not paid or asked to give this review, it is my honest and personal opinion.