I have a problem. I love books, but sometimes I wonder if I love acquiring books more than reading them. That’s probably not true, but my “To Read” shelf has consistently held more books than my “Already Read” shelf. In fact, it has become enough of a problem that I have purchased books only to find that I already own them. To solve that problem, about a month ago I decided to catalog every novel in my library. I’ve used Goodreads before, but I’ve always been unimpressed. It’s too clunky, and never really provided the features I was looking for. Instead, I found My Library.

My Library only appears to be available through the Google Play Store currently, but it is wonderful. You can simply scan in books using their ISBN barcode, or if you have a collection with a lot of older books like me, you can look them up. The app pulls from multiple open source databases so you can select the best match. Some of the databases are better than others and you may have some cleanup to do afterward. You can even mark books as read, leave comments on individual books, and export your entire library into xls (from there you can go to CSV and get really crazy if you want).

I finished uploading my entire library the other day finally, and now I can give you some of the stats that I uncovered. These are all conveniently surfaced by the app. Let’s take a look:

Number of Books: 315
Number of Books Read: 122
Percentage of Books Read: 38.73%
Duplicates Discovered: 5
Most Popular Author: Larry Niven (24)
Second Most Popular Author: Clifford D. Simak (18)

I would like to get that read percentage much closer to 50% before I buy any more books, but I’m a slow reader, and the idea of reading 25.5 books before buying any is a little daunting. It’s worth noting that this little catalog largely discounts any books I’ve listened to on Audible or read on a device unless of course I also own them physically. I didn’t want to get too far into the weeds here… at least not yet.

If you skipped to the end of this post, you may have noticed that another book came off my reading list though. The Dispatcher by John Scalzi was wonderful. It’s a short book, and on Audible it has an expert performance by Zachary Quinto. This is one of those books that would translate very well into a movie. Definitely worth a listen or a read. Anyway, I’ve droned on for longer than I wanted to and delayed this post enough since my original title was Saturday Stats. Enjoy your week and enjoy the new story I posted Friday.

Currently reading/listening to:
The Magician by Raymond E. Feist
Revival by Stephen King
Back to the Moon by Homer H. Hickam Jr.
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions by J. S. Morin