I read a T shirt or bumper sticker a few months ago that read something like:
It’s Not Hoarding if it’s Books.
Now that’s a statement to which any true book lover can relate. Is there ever enough space? Nope, I say. Nope. Nope. And again, Nope.
Well, I don’t exactly have any help for you regarding storage space.
So, where I’m going is this—Did you know there’s an app for keeping track of your books? Of course there is, and you already knew this because there is an app for everything. And, well, if you love books a whole lot, you might already be using this app.
Anyway, the app is called MY LIBRARY, fittingly enough. And you can download it and give it a try. I think I had actually downloaded this one a few short years ago but didn’t really feel like dealing with it. Besides, I thought at the time, didn’t you want to write your own program for this in C++ years ago? I did, I did. I had an issue with storing ISBN info. I wanted to store the ISBN as a string and couldn’t do it because, as we all know (think of passwords here) you can’t start a string with a number. Anyway, C++ is very restrictive with regard to types. Every variable has to be a identified as a type: A string, a floating point number, an integer . . . and perhaps I could have written it in Python which is far less restrictive. And maybe I didn’t write the thing because I was lazy. In any case, I wanted my books, my info, only on my computer, not stored on someone’s server located God only knows where . . .
But I digress here, let me get to the point. I downloaded the My Library app to my phone and started playing around, just to see the ins and outs of it. It works, and is pretty intuitive and easy to use. I was only gonna scan a few books to get a feel. I spent the whole first evening and had about 30 or 40 books scanned in and then I thought, I’ll stop around 50. After the first weekend I had a hundred or two. The next weekend I had a thousand. Then a week later I had eleven hundred scanned in. And that’s where I stopped. Well, technically I have 1102 books scanned into the thing. The thing is, that is probably, maybe close to a fourth of my total books. So, needless to say, I’ve got a long way to go. I haven’t scanned anything in for a month or so now.
There is a cool feature where you can get stats on your books in the app, the ones you’ve scanned in. You have an option to check a box to indicate whether you’ve read a particular book or not. The stats started out pretty good for me, showing that I had read about 80%, but as I added more and more books that I hadn’t read, well, things got a little more depressing. I believe I’m at around 38 to 40%. Of course, a person could just add books that have been read into the app, and then keep track of things from there. But I can see the use of having a complete list of your books so when you are in a bookstore you can quickly see whether you already have a copy of a particular book. I had a case of buying a book that I thought I had only looked at and then put back on the shelf, thinking I would buy that one another time. Well, I went back the next time and bought the book, only to find out that I had, in fact purchased it the first time. I didn’t think there would be a problem, since the store had all kinds of information that they gathered from me and would be able to see that I had made a mistake. Perhaps they would only give me a store credit? But even that would be ok. Nope. They would not. The store was Chapter 11 Books (sort of a quasi used book and record store that was owned by what had once been Books A Million. Made me angry enough not to go back and buy any more books from them. I mean really, how was I getting over by reading another copy of the same book. I guess I could have given the extra book as a gift or whatever. I didn’t, as I couldn’t think of anyone in my immediate circle who might enjoy it.
So anyway, getting back to the My Library app. There is a way, supposedly to export your books from My Library, but I haven’t tried it. I really want to know things like—in what format, and to where can I export the info.? To a spreadsheet or database program? MS Office? It will be interesting to see, whenever I try to use this feature.
Just about every time I log into the app I get a message saying that I’m one of the app owner’s best customers and could I please rate the app? The app will still be free, he states. I always choose the Maybe Later option as I want to see how the export option works and whether it is useful for my needs.
The app is FREE, if you didn’t catch that in the last paragraph. And (at least so far) there aren’t a bunch of ads popping up to annoy a person. No ads at all, actually. I really should go ahead and rate the app. I guess I could always change my rating later if things didn’t work out.
But hey, I’m telling you about it. I’m putting it out there. The app has been fun so far. And it could be useful for my series books, to see which books I actually have/own from a series. Sometimes that is a little confusing, can be difficult to remember which one book I still need to buy.
So there it is. That’s all I wanted to say. I know I have been away for a long while. There is a reason, sort of, for my absence, which may or may not be a valid one. Depends on your point of view, I guess. I’ll cover that later. For now I just wanted to let you book lovers know about the My Library app.
Happy Reading!