BookBuddy Pro: Library Manager 4+

I have used this app for years and years to track the books I read. And I find it perfect for that. It’s easy to add books, and import the information; this can be done by scanning the book’s ISBN barcode, or typing in information about the author or title and letting Book Buddy find it for you or you can add things manually.

And there are lots of categories for describing the book and keeping track of things like whether you lend it out to someone else. You can define tags to put books into a certain category like genre (mysteries, sf, etc.), or author’s gender, if you read it for a class or book group, or whether the copy that you read was from the library or your own copy. Add long notes in the Notes space. I see that it’s also great for cataloging one’s library, and perhaps someday I will have the energy to do that!

Also I would like to say that the developers keep improving it and responded to my request which was to have a category of Unfinished as well as the categories of Unread, Being read, & Finished. At my age I think if I truly don’t like a book and I’ve given it a good chance, I get to stop reading it! So I can record in the book buddy that I started this book, so I had an interest in it, but I didn’t finish it and then there’s a place to record the reason for not finishing it if you wish to do so. And that’s very helpful. Finally you can easily export your lists to different formats: CSV, TSV, PDF, or HTML.

This is by far my favorite iOS/iPadOS app, using it almost daily to catalog my entire collection. While not as extensive as some, I’ve added about 850 titles so far with lots more to go. I’ve added each one manually, since online search frequently pulls in incorrect information uploaded from other sources (not BookBuddy’s fault!). Some features I particularly appreciate are the attention to detail and the amount of information that’s able to be recorded for each book. I am actually considering using the Library of Congress Classification system for my library and this app supports it! If I have any suggestions for the app’s improvement, they would be the following:

- Multiple authors per title. This could be extended to translators, editors, etc. Having only one author results in some co-authors being difficult to locate in the database.
- BC dates!!!!!! This is a must have, since all my titles published “pre-Jesus” are listed as year 1, with a note at the bottom documenting the correct year. Those with a lot of Plato, Homer, etc. will go crazy.
- It would be nice if the Date Added and Purchase Date fields could be stored as year only, consistent with all other date fields. This is my OCD nature coming through, but I’d like to be able to document books I purchased decades ago, but obviously don’t remember the exact dates.

I did not want to pay for an app to organize my books, so I tried about 10 different free methods and apps. Hated every single one of them. Someone on a Facebook group suggested Book Buddy, even sent me a video of them using it, I was cautious but within a day I was in love. Easy to scan in new and old books, create separate libraries for your kids, keep track of loaned books, and best of all, you can personalize the categorization of your library! Need a 1,000 word novella, no problem. Need a grade 12 standard, no problem. I am loving it. Only downside is textbooks. But to be honest only a few of us are likely to keep to many of them anyway, and you can always manually search by title, author, or isbn. And you can link up with other app users, so yeah. I kinda recommend if you have more than 100 books, after that I couldn’t memorize them well enough, but hey. You do you. But seriously, why try a free app that limits the books you can catalogue when Book Buddy is cheap enough and worth so much more. Bask in the glory of a well catalogued book collection!