LibraryThing 4+

Let me start with my favorite thing: the barcode scanner! I am organizing my husband’s niche non fiction collection which is approaching 1000 books. Yes they have their own room. I was able to scan 90% of them in only a few hours! The rest were published before bar codes were a thing, but searching by isbn wasn’t too painful either!

Now for the app deficits: I wish the app had greater capabilities and personalization. On the web I can sort his collection using LOC call number. This is how we’ve organized the physical books in the office. It is so frustrating that I can’t view the books in that order on my phone. I can’t even see the LOC number when I click into a book. I can see it if I try to edit the book info, but that’s a pain. I can’t even change what data I see on the landing page for the book. Because I can get this how I need it on the web browser, I just use that on the computer most of the time but I crave portability and organization that the app does not accommodate.

This app is incredible, has about 96% of the features I want (including a bunch I didn't even know I wanted!), And makes it very simple to add books. However, the rest of the features (I.e. adding catalogues, tagging, etc) are very cumbersome to access. You can't do it right from the app, it opens a web based window which is difficult to navigate, with tiny text, and pop up windows that move outside your field of view.

One last feature I'd love to see (besides editing catalogues and tagging from within the app) is Library due dates. You can add which library you borrow a book from, and can add dates for when you received it, read it and finished it. But I wish you could add the return date, and possibly even receive a notification. Adding a sliding scale showing the percentage read when returned would be cool too.

Despite these issues, this is one of the best inventory apps I've come across, and therefore I'm still giving it 4 stars. I'd immediately jump it up to 5 if I could edit book details and add/reorder catalogues from within the app.

Thanks for the great app, looking forward to future updats!

Honestly, it is a decent basic app for my needs. First the good, great scanner for quickly adding books to your library list. It is connected to a couple sources and hits in the vast majority of books I scan. I have some very old books that are no longer in print, but I can manually add them with the isbn number. There are preset “collections” which allows for a wishlist, read, currently reading, read but don’t own, type options. While this is a nice feature, it is also what frustrates me as there are ZERO options to modify this list. I have libraries in multiple rooms and multiple houses and would live to be able to specify WHERE a given book is at any given time. For instance, “on loan to neighbor” or “kid’s college dorm”. 🤣. Please update to allow us to create our own collections and I will happily up my rating to 5 stars!