Calibre

A few months ago Matt introduced me to calibre, an awesome Free and Open Source Software e-book management/library cataloguing system. We had plans to start adding all the books we own to calibre for reference and fun. Not only does it record the basic important information (title, author, publication stuff, etc.), but you can also download covers and create your own columns for recording information. More on that later though.

I was a little impatient before we got started and decided one day to just get a rough count of the books in our house. As I tallied the books, I did a very, very general sorting of them by genre using my first impressions. Really sorting the books by genre would take forever and there would be overlaps. To the left is what I came up with at the time.

I had estimated we had about 590 to 600 books, knowing that I'd left out some in the living room and our cookbooks, and may have forgotten one or two others. I was pretty proud to have that many books, though, and to know that I'd read a significant portion of them.


Just before Christmas Matt and I finally set about putting all the books into calibre using the ISBN numbers. calibre is great (especially because it is free) and I would recommend any of you with personal libraries of your own to check it out -- it does have some annoyances though. Sometimes there was a little trouble putting in the ISBN numbers (and also, though this is not calibre's fault, ISBN numbers were not used until the early 70's, so earlier than that books will not have them and you will have to the enter the information manually to an empty template ... not too bad unless you have about 50 old/vintage books that you used for wedding decorations ... like me).

The other thing that sometimes made me grumble was how calibre gathered information for the books. Usually, it seemed to get the info from Google using the ISBN (although later we added isbndb.com as a source and I think that helped some). The info was not always correct or consistent. For example, when I put in the Harry Potter series, some of them were formatted as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone while others were formatted as The Prisoner of Azkaban: Harry Potter Book 4. So that was a little annoying to fix but not bad. When I would click on the ISBN link though, it would link to http://www.worldcat.org/. WorldCat is neat, and sometimes the information there was correct - so I'm not sure why calibre didn't borrow it from there. Other times WorldCat was also incorrect or the titles were screwy .... so getting the books in was sometimes a bit tedious is what I am getting at.

However, I don't want that to discourage you from using calibre if you want some free library software, because in the end, having all our books listed in one place is super awesome. I like that I can easily see what books I own and have yet to read (a lot more than I thought). I made a column for me and one for Matt that I can check "read" or "not read" or leave blank if it is something like a dictionary that no one really "reads." I can also see that I was WAY off when I estimated the count the first time.

At the final count of all the books in our house (before bringing over about 20 more from Matt's house after the official count) we had a total of 741 books. Let me say that with text, too, so you can feel the magnitude: SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-ONE BOOKS!!!

Whoa. How do those all fit in our small house? Well, I plan to write some future posts about how to fit a 1000-book library in your house along with you, your spouse, and a cat. Ok, so we aren't at 1000 yet, but we are up to 767 after bringing some from Matt's house, and he's still got more there. I don't have spaces for them yet, but we'll see ...

Here's some more library art. You can see I've read a significant portion of our "readable" (read: not dictionaries and cookbooks) books, but still have a long way to go to fill out the gray area. Matt and I have both read 46 of the books we own.