Despite the growing popularity of e-books, people still love their books. I mean the bound, physical books that sit on the shelf. And the nightstand. And the floor. People keep books for all sorts of reasons, most but mostly because they represent our better selves. We want to be the kind of person who is learning to speak French. We want to be the kind of person who does a daily Bible study. We want to be the kind of person who keeps up with our book club. But whether or not we are, the books tend to pile up. When you have enough books that they are hard to recall from memory, a library app might be the thing for you.

There are a few cataloging services out there, including LibraryThing, Delicious Library, Shelfari, and others. I’ll admit that I have not tried them all. But I have fallen IN LOVE with GoodReads and its iphone/ipad app.

Love love love xoxoxox

I’m putting The GoodReads app in the same category as Evernote. That’s how much I love it.

Yes, it’s a “social media app” for bookworms. It allows you to capture what you are reading or what you want to read or what you have read, rate it, review it, and share it with your friends. It allows your friends to introduce you to the great stuff they are reading. But it also ORGANIZES BOOKS YOU OWN.

Wait, let me rephrase that. It doesn’t actually move them. You need me for that. But using the camera on your phone or ipad, it allows you to simply hover over a book’s ISBN barcode, and it **ZAPS** the book’s info into your virtual library. Cover image. Pub date. Everything. ZAP!

That Quick!

Done.

Scan the next one.

I’m really impressed with it.

You might not care so much about all of that. But if you’ve ever wondered if you still own a book that you used to own, you can now see in a second, and export a list of your ENTIRE HOME LIBRARY if you want.

Not only can you mark a book as read or unread, but you can “place” it on a “shelf” that you describe, like “Bedroom”, “den”, or even “lent out”.

Just click “Export”, and you get a really nice file that can be read by Excel or any spreadsheet program. That means that just by zapping a bookshelf full of your books with your phone’s camera, you can come up with a list of books you own.

If you are organizing, you might consider purging a few as you go, and finding the ones that have been hiding under piles in order to relocate them back to the bookshelf, but the hard work of writing them down to make a list of what you own is now GONE!

I really, really try not to use all caps in my writing, but this is really too EXCITING not to.

If you have a home library that you’d like to catalog, go to www.GoodReads.com, set up an account, download the app on your mobile gadget, scan in about 10 books, check out the export feature, and come back here to tell me what you think. Cool, huh?

So we may not be speaking French, doing daily devotionals, or keeping up with the book club, but thanks to GoodReads, we can definitely improve our knowledge of what’s in our own library, and never, ever buy the same book more than once.