My search has, thus far, been fruitless so I am asking here as a last ditch attempt …

[fooflington@infosec.exchange]

My search has, thus far, been fruitless so I am asking here as a last ditch attempt …

I am looking for a self-hostable web based application to be an inventory of the (real, rather than e-) #books in the house. It should be able to accept a list of #ISBNs as input for importing items and look them up (with covers) to ingest their metadata.

It doesn't need #library style circulation (I don't want to run a library so don't want #Koha or equivalent)

I've been using #HomeBox which is ok but only understands "things" rather than "books" (I've written a isbn2homebox script to make that easier). I'd like something purpose designed for books though.

Does anyone use anything like this? There are plenty of free or subscription things available online, but I want to run this myself.

Thanks ️

#selfhosting #inventory

[mekki@mas.to]

@fooflington I used DataCrow for this purpose a decade ago. Looks like it's still around and has a ton of new features: https://datacrow.org/

[pcfe@chaos.social]

@fooflington I use Alexandria
https://github.com/mvz/alexandria-book-collection-manager/

for me, the ISBN import has good days and bad days, so YMMV.
Recommend to give it a testrun before investing time and money into a solution for barcode scanning in bulk and then feeding the ISBNs to Alexandria (that's how I entered my books initially)

Since I tend to add less than a dozen books a year, when the ISBN lookup is not working that day I tend to shrug and just fill the hand full of fields manually

[da5nsy@social.coop]

@fooflington
It's designed to be social, so this might not match super well what you're wanting it for, but: bookwyrm?

Bookwyrm Documentation

(docs.joinbookwyrm.com)

[jandi@mastodon.social]

@fooflington Haven't used it, but BookLogr fits the description: https://booklogr.app/

It searches in OpenLibrary, I added a couple ISBNs in the demo and worked fine. It has an API so I guess you could add a list of them programatically more or less easily. Seems actively maintained.

It even has a share with Mastodon feature! (the author is here @mozzo and has favorited this very post!).

Hope it helps.

[gwenynen@toot.wales]

Uncertain if it fulfills all you criteria, but
https://www.shelf-cat.com/

[mozzo@fosstodon.org]

@jandi Thank you for sharing my project! @fooflington if you do try it out, I hope it fits your needs. I'm always looking to improve the app, so feel free to ping me if you have any questions, find any bugs, or have ideas for new features.

[jandi@mastodon.social]

@mozzo @fooflington Oh, that's so nice to hear, I love this moments!

Thanks to @distinctdipole for boosting! See what you did!

[jandi@mastodon.social]

@distinctdipole @mozzo @fooflington That's even better

[unsoluble@mastodon.social]

@fooflington @quixoticgeek I’ve toyed around with TinyCat in the past (is free for personal use), and the LibraryThing backend is great. https://www.librarycat.org/

[fooflington@infosec.exchange]

@jandi @mozzo @distinctdipole Thanks, this looks very promising, I'll give it a spin and let you know!