Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets

Im working on a similar project, Colibri (https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri), an app to manage your ebook collection. Librari is looking really slick! Also, It’s always interesting to see how others approach schema selection and customization.

If I may, I would suggest adding support for ingesting data from open sources, for example OpenLibrary, WikiData, the LoC API, and a bunch of others. Since you’re building a for-profit project, you can probably also tap the billed services to get high-quality metadata. But even with OpenLibrary alone, you have access to a treasure trove of information that spares users from having to type off things from their books. That allows for bulk import, high-res covers, and so on.

I’m currently working on the metadata reconciliation engine in Colibri, so feel free to check out the source every once in a while.

My biggest complaint with library management tools, and I think this applies to Librari as well, is the lack of multi-user support. I have a lot of books in my "home library", spread out over a few rooms. But I'm not the only person interacting with this library. Their are books on the shelves that "belong" to other people in the house, and we all joint manage the books. Sharing logins can work, but misses out on so many things that we would like to have.

My dream tool for this would allow multiple people to be "members" of a library, and be able to belong to multiple members themselves. They could collectively manage things like metadata, like what books are on the shelves, but could have individual things like ratings or tracking what they've read.

Plex is actually a really good example of this. I hope some day to find a tracker like that for my books.

Hack I learned recently: take pictures of all your bookshelves. Then you can search the text on the spines (author, title) in your photo app.

I use https://libib.com for this use case. I didn't see it mentioned here, so figured I'd share.

I'll also mention a fun coding project that I used ChatGPT on. I created a data enriched spreadsheet out of my physical books. This could then be used to bulk import into libib for a searchable and visual digital bookshelf.

First I took photos of my bookshelves such that the spines were visible. Then I had ChatGPT vision model transcribe visible titles and authors, and guess the books based on that. Then I turned that into a CSV. Finally I had ChatGPT generate a Python script that used the Google Books API to enrich the spreadsheet with ISBNs. Finally I bulk uploaded that CSV with ISBNs to libib, and voila, I had a digitized library.

Just in case this gives you any ideas!

The problem with library apps isn't really the app. It's trivially easy to spin up a database with all the necessary fields. The real problem with library apps (or systems) is having to actually manage/index/code/scan the books, which is a pain.

I have more than 500 books too. I have tried using multiple platforms and I end up leaving them because they become a social platform or more than a simple book management. I don't have issues with that, but it's about how much time I want to spend on interacting with people. For e.g. my wife used to be very active in Librarything and Goodreads, but during covid and post covid, she has completely stopped using these platforms. So depending upon peoples needs the platform can become useful or time leeches. And it will depend upon what they need from it at that given moment.

Now, I have an excel sheet with all the books I have, and I don't see any way to import that list into the platform. I don't see myself sitting and rescanning or manually entering that list. For maintaining the library, i.e. whenever we buy books at that moment scanning or manual entry makes sense. But during onboarding I need an excel or csv import provision.

Currently we are using [My Library](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vgm.mylibr...), an android app. I am ready to move out of it as then the whole family can operate it.

Features I will like:

- Easy on boarding of a large collection

- Auto categorization. I don't want to sit manually and tag it or set the genre

- Multiple people be able to add and update a collection (Family mode)

- Borrow/Loaned status

- Books read but not owned

- Sharing the collection with closed group (friends and family)

- Sharing the collection with a larger community (if someone in the family is interested, but only in their profile and not all family members)

- Book recommendations (things that fall in my interest are fine, but also that surprise me). I miss the days when the book store owner used to remember us and used to recommend something which otherwise I wouldn't have picked up.

- And obviously able to export my data. I have been burned by enough platforms in the past 15 years that, this is necessary!

This looks like it's a website without an app, so a few questions for you:

1. How does the site perform on mobile? If it doesn't that's a non starter for a large audience segment.

2. What's the pricing? There are several free options out there for managing your book collection, so unless there's a fremium tier (which there's no concrete language about pricing on the pricing page around subscription cost or subscription tiers) less people will want to try this out.

3. Why should someone use a web based library management tool over one that's hosted locally (either as a phone app, or as a site local to your network)?

4. What problems does this solve that others have missed? I would love for that to be front and center on the landing page.

I'm in an adjacent area, cataloging my huge collection of periodicals for my vintage ad collection (adretro.com). The biggest thing that helped me that I didn't see you mention but maybe I missed it: taking book cover photos to populate the inventory. OpenAI vision can easily extract the book, author and meta data. This speeds up the data entry considerably. I scan a whole box of periodicals and upload a zip of all the images. My software extracts the info. So for yours, if I just take photos of all the books on a shelf, it could handle the rest.

You don't mention (or I didn't see it) the ability to add books by scanning the isbn. Manually adding books is too time consuming.

This is awesome. Exactly the sort of thing I like to see on HN: someone going deep on a niche they really care about. The app is more polished than I expected.

The design is nice and clean. I really appreciate dark mode as well, though some of the text on this page, for example https://app.librari.io/subscription looks like it needs to be tweaked for dark mode.

I would genuinely use this, as I don't always like the public aspect of Goodreads, but it would depend on your pricing structure and privacy policy.

Feature request: bulk import of books.

I also use the My Library Android application. I have about 1,200 books scanned through the ISBN tool in that app, which took a few hours across a few weekends. Common issues were old books not being found, or information formatting issues. Overall though - all I cared about was a comprehensive view to track across when we move homes in case any boxes get lost. That app has very limited statistics, but I haven't found myself interested in exploring anything further, nor care about tracking my own reading progress, tbh. Like others mentioned - the scanning is slow and error prone and frustrating. A bulk import from a photograph of a book shelf sounds fantastic, but with re-releases of books, I'd be curious about it's accuracy (reviewing and editing incorrect information is the worst after you scanned the ISBN, so a nice UI like in this app that could make the correction process easier would be great!). The single photo with multiple books and bulk import I would have paid for, definitely. UI of the MyLibrary app is not great, but it is free, and I can export the data, so happy with it. Someone else mentioned multi-user support, which would be nice, but not confident I could convince my family to scan books either. Once you get everything in, scanning additional books as they come is easy.

Let me save to a local database to manage my own data & backups.

I just want a simple/quick/easy way to scan all of the books in my house and print spine labels like the ones they use in a library.

Dewey decimal or Library of Congress or whatever. We just have too many books (mainly children's books) and I want an easy low-thought/low-friction way to identify exactly where each book should be put away.

Would this help with my problem? Is there already a solution for this?

> Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.

That what I concluded after a cursory search of this space as well.

Care to share any thoughts about what tech stack you've used to put this together? Which libraries/frameworks you used, whether you would again if you were starting again today. I don't have a need for this app personally, but I love hearing the (candid) experience reports when people build nice things like this.

This looks cool and I wish you luck but I'd probably never use something closed source for this.

Been on the lookout for an open source version but they all seem kind of unessecarily bulky or otherwise poorly maintained.

Would be interested in suggestions anyone has for whole apps or libs that work well when glued together for this purpose.

1. I can’t find a way to add the date or month when I finished the book. I mean, I tried adding books I read this year, but all the books are recorded as “read” in the current month.

2. I can’t find a place to add the start date and end date for reading a book, but I do see an “average time to complete” data. Do we need to add “custom fields” to make this work?

Good: 1. I’ve been manually trying to do this over a spreadsheet and run a data analysis at the end of the year. Thanks for making this. My manual work https://www.prasannakumarr.in/books-read-2018

2. Multi-currency support is great

3. Adding custom fields is also great.

Great work overall!

My only qualm is that I’ve tried many of these apps that got introduced on HN. But most of them end up getting shut down and become graveyard projects. I want to make sure the developer is serious about its future, especially at the time of vibe coding adventures. I want this to be like a https://www.monicahq.com/, small but still profitable.

Off-Topic: I thought this was a web-dev dependencies-tracker kind of thing, and was preparing to rage-out.

This looks great! My favorite projects posted on HN are the ones that come out of folks scratching their own personal itches.

Like you, I have a bunch of books on various bookshelves in the house. I also have a number of collapsing cardboard boxes in my basement filled with books from my parents'/grandparents' houses. At some point, I really need to sort through all of these and figure out a) what even is there b) what do I keep to put on shelves and c) is there anything worth selling to a shop or giving to the library vs tossing? Complicating this is that many of these books are ancient, and even newer ones aren't necessarily in pristine condition.

I have an old CueCat lying around I was going to use to scan barcodes on books new enough to have them... that'll be tedious enough, but going through the rest manually is going to be a giant project (which is part of why they're still there in my basement).

I don't see it on the site from a cursory review (apologies if I missed it): do you support importing from ISBNs (such as scanned by a CueCat)? I'd also be quite interested in the machine vision aspect others have mentioned here (though since they aren't on a bookshelf, it would likely be individual photos of each book as they are pulled out of the box)...

Tying into that, I'm curious what the workflow for inputting books will be like, both for my boxes-o-books case, and for the general bookcase import case. I could 100% see myself using this if it was a nice straightforward brainless process I could bang out in an afternoon while watching a show, but if it's more of a manually-search-and-input process, I'm definitely going to lose patience before I finish them all :)

Tacking onto what others have said about automated labeling, that would be extremely useful too---especially for the books in poor condition, but even for the nicer ones, just so that I could get a handle on them all. I have a Bluetooth label printer that could be fantastic here...

I'll follow this project with interest for sure!

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