LibraryThing

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.

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!

I love that the App is fully free. No trick fees or upgrades necessary. I love that it has flexibility. The flexibility needs some work. Adding Categories: the pop up box is not visible without fidgeting with zooming. The font while adding categories is super tiny and difficult to see. It would be nice to be able to delete unwanted/accidentally added categories. I have some categories that are duplicates because the app was slow to save so I clicked “save” again and it created duplicate categories. Book Covers: Also, it won’t allow me to choose covers that other users have uploaded, I either have to either use the blank covers or upload my own. New Books: I have yet to figure out how to completely add a new book to the database. Book Titles: When I attempt to edit the titles of books, it saves it in the editing screen (the way that I typed it in) but it doesn’t carry over to my library. Searching for Books: The barcode scanner is wonderful! The manual search could use some work. I’d like to see it broaden search results, providing more results. The way the search is currently, requires a guess and check to find the book that I am looking for. Typing in the whole title brings different results from typing the author vs typing part of the title. It is not consistent. Searching the barcode numbers manually works very well, unless it’s an older book. I have added over 300 books in a few days. I do love the app!! Please consider these updates. Thank you! Update: I’d also like for the tags created by others to also appear in my library.