
Ask HN: Personal Library Manager? - polm23
I have a lot of books. In particular I have a lot of doujinshi, or self-published amateur magazines, that don&#x27;t have ISBNs or other universal identifiers.<p>I would like to take photos of the covers of these, keep track of what box&#x2F;shelf they&#x27;re stored in, and be able to add metadata. Is there any good software for that?
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majkinetor
Don't look any further. Calibre FTW.

Some features (there are thousands of them):

\- You can make plugin for any magazine (python) including self-published

\- You can scan books for ISBNs and get certain 1 on 1 match online without
any effort or search foo. Without ISBN it will search by given criteria

\- Batch operations for everything

\- It first uses cover of the book (first page in PDF, epub etc), downloads
covers if there aren't any, or generates them if nothing can be found

\- You can add arbitrary metadata and give them types (bool, text, urls...)

\- You can share via web server and access lib from browser and even add books
from browser or simply copy them to special folder

\- Its x-platform

\- It supports zillion formats, and basically you can add zip or anything.
Audiobooks could be handled better but ok.

\- Its updated weekly for years

\- You can have different libraries, groups, virtual libs etc.

\- Awesome converter from-to number of formats

\- You can both have online tags applied and your own tags. I have personal
tags such as `reading`, `must read` etc. along with my own classification on
books that isn't merged with online stuff and is kept separatelly.

\- Awesome ebook reader

\- Many more options

\- There are plugins to put kindle encrypted books offline !

Simply, there isn't anything better out there. Anybody not using it simply
doesn't know better.

The only thing it doesn't have is in text search, but hey... I am sure its
comming one day or you can implement samo mumbo-jumbo on your own.

NOTE: Calibre is IMO not that good for research papers although YMMV. Zotero
might be better choice for this.

~~~
voldacar
Calibre is good, but last time I checked, it didn't let you organize books in
a tree-like directory structure, does it still just dump all your books in one
"folder"?

~~~
majkinetor
Its better then having folders. Folders are meaningless in organization of
multimedia. Better to use tags as they are more flexible.

Then you create virtual folders via tag search. You can show them as tabs or
have them in the menu to select. Single book can be in more then one virtual
folder that way - for example in Biology and Programming.

But no trees of any kind.

~~~
groby_b
Folders aren't "meaningless", they provide relational information (in form of
a hierarchy), something that tags are really bad at.

It's not folders that are important, it's subfolders. Many fields have an
implicit hierarchical organization, and reflecting that in some way is
extremely helpful. As are tags. Ideally, you want both.

~~~
majkinetor
Folders are special case of tags.

Tags can be organized better - its easy to create tag exclusion groups,
something that for example Gitlab recently added in the form of tag1::tag2 so
when you put one of those any existing one gets removed

You can get folders from tags within VFS, for examle TMSU does this ( a
x-platform file tagging system).

~~~
groby_b
As a user? I don't care a lick.

Of course we can map any kind of relational system into a series of strings.
What matters is support to do it in an intuitive way. Nested folders are
intuitive, in terms of organizing, browsing, and highlighting the existing
structure when adding new items.

Tags fail at least at the last two without UI support.

------
yboris
I always recommend looking at _AlternativeTo.net_ \- pick a software that's
close-enough and start looking at its proposed alternatives:
[https://alternativeto.net/software/delicious-
library/](https://alternativeto.net/software/delicious-library/)

ps - minor shameless plug -- if you need a library for videos, try my _Video
Hub App_ \- MIT open source: [https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-
App](https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App)

~~~
fjcp
Great suggestion, AlternativeTo.net was crucial during my transition to Linux
some years ago and I recommend it even to people on Windows trying to find
alternatives to commercial software. Although it may not have some obscure
software that would be what you are looking for, it's a starting point that
can give you some names to help further the search.

------
jdc
Calibre might work for you. It's generally geared toward e-books, but also
lets you add an "empty book" and then attach metadata to it.

[https://calibre-ebook.com](https://calibre-ebook.com)

~~~
stultus
Happy Calibre user here. works like a charm.

------
bayindirh
If you're using macOS, There's delicious library [0] and librarian pro [1] I'm
aware of. There might be other alternatives too.

[0]: [https://www.delicious-monster.com/](https://www.delicious-monster.com/)

[1]:
[https://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro/](https://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro/)

~~~
bouvin
I can recommend Bookpedia:
[https://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/](https://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/)

------
ziari
I would approach this as an inventory management problem (for which there are
plenty of FOSS solutions).

I'm not sure you require specialized software built for book/magazine
collections. Conceptually, you have a warehouse where almost everything has
"Qty: 1". The rest of the metadata (e.g., titles, authors, ISBNs, storage
boxes) can be custom fields.

------
Hates_
I'm using Airtable to keep track of my books and films. The added ability to
pull the data via a custom API is great.

[https://airtable.com/](https://airtable.com/)

My read books table
[https://airtable.com/shrlT6devX08UsF0o/tblejWxpyIWMDek3b?blo...](https://airtable.com/shrlT6devX08UsF0o/tblejWxpyIWMDek3b?blocks=hide)

------
mephosto
I would use a citation manager like Zotero:
[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

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deknos82
Tellico Rocks! It can search bookdbs and can also Investors dvds and other
stuff

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Foxboron
I personally use papis to keep track of my references and sources. Can
probably be used for this.

[https://github.com/papis/papis](https://github.com/papis/papis)

------
jitl
I would recommend a database in Notion
([https://notion.so](https://notion.so)), a general purpose organization tool.

Disclaimer: I work at Notion.

~~~
VvR-Ox
I would not recommend this in comparison to Calibre.

Notion is a commercial product and I'm just guessing but probably vendor lock-
in in the long run.

Also it seems to be focused on team work and not managing papers/books. So as
good as using this you could also use any other wiki software or database to
do this.

# Calibre \- Has server solutions to host your library easily \- Is made for
managing books etc. \- It's open source and has a big community as well as
plugins
([https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre))

Don't get me wrong here, Notion looks like a great product and in my opinion
it could be the next big thing in project management if marketing keeps up and
they can convince the right people.

Only thing I really dislike about Notion so far: \- It's not Open Source :-p
(I'd love that)

For other things I'm sure it's awesome.

~~~
scrollaway
As a fan of notion I agree with your post.

That said, Calibre is awful imo. I would recommend looking into Polar
Bookshelf (open source): [https://getpolarized.io](https://getpolarized.io)

~~~
VvR-Ox
Thanks for the recommendation - I didn't know Polar and will definitely give
it a try.

What do you think is awful about Calibre?

~~~
groby_b
Cannot speak for the OP, but from my POV - dear $DEITY, the UI is bleeding
awful. And so is the experience of using it. Yes, it gets the job done, but it
falls far below the standards of any polished product.

For some, it is worth it, because it provides an OSS way to deal with audio
books. To others, who care about UI/UX - well, it provides an OSS way to deal
with books.

------
bschne
Airtable ([https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com)) might be a good
option, it's more like a general purpose organizational tool somewhere between
spreadsheets and a database.

It would allow you to start really simple, with not much more than a
list/spreadsheet, and then tack on additional features, referenced data and
things like images as you go.

------
olah_1
I recommend using LibraryThing[1] and it's mobile app for cataloging. Then I
would recommend TinyCat[2] if you want to lend these books out to people.

[1] [https://www.librarything.com/home](https://www.librarything.com/home)

[2] [https://www.librarycat.org/](https://www.librarycat.org/)

------
selimthegrim
Similarly, I am in the process of trying to prevent the math department of our
university from discarding a lot of books in their library of interest to the
physics department. I have a table full of stacks of books without barcodes
(although they do have ISBNs) and grumpy students/librarians demanding I get
on with vacating the table

------
sahinyanlik
I am using goodreads.com to create my shelves.

* You can find your book easily and add to your shelf and also you can track if you read or not. * Most of the book have its photos. I have both Turkish and English books and for both it is very effective. I didn't try Calibre for Turkish books btw. Also you can check your books anywhere you like.

~~~
Fnoord
Calibre can integrate with Goodreads if you use the plugin in Calibre for
Goodreads. This way you can synchronize your shelves and progress. There's an
obvious downside to Goodreads: your privacy. Having all my privacy settings as
high as possible, I do like it, but a data leak would expose my personal data.

------
jayaram
might not work for everyone, but I use Zotero, its not specifically designed
for books and magazines, but it works and keeps track of all my stuff!

link - [https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

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wiggler00m
I use: Apple Books, Kindle, Play Books.

Will check out Calibre - thanks.

------
Ylodi
Libib is a good app for simple book catalogue -
[https://www.libib.com](https://www.libib.com)

------
deesep
I also use Calibre. It's been 4years and I absolutely love it.

