LibraryThing 4+

Honestly, it is a decent basic app for my needs. First the good, great scanner for quickly adding books to your library list. It is connected to a couple sources and hits in the vast majority of books I scan. I have some very old books that are no longer in print, but I can manually add them with the isbn number. There are preset “collections” which allows for a wishlist, read, currently reading, read but don’t own, type options. While this is a nice feature, it is also what frustrates me as there are ZERO options to modify this list. I have libraries in multiple rooms and multiple houses and would live to be able to specify WHERE a given book is at any given time. For instance, “on loan to neighbor” or “kid’s college dorm”. 🤣. Please update to allow us to create our own collections and I will happily up my rating to 5 stars!

Let me start with my favorite thing: the barcode scanner! I am organizing my husband’s niche non fiction collection which is approaching 1000 books. Yes they have their own room. I was able to scan 90% of them in only a few hours! The rest were published before bar codes were a thing, but searching by isbn wasn’t too painful either!

Now for the app deficits: I wish the app had greater capabilities and personalization. On the web I can sort his collection using LOC call number. This is how we’ve organized the physical books in the office. It is so frustrating that I can’t view the books in that order on my phone. I can’t even see the LOC number when I click into a book. I can see it if I try to edit the book info, but that’s a pain. I can’t even change what data I see on the landing page for the book. Because I can get this how I need it on the web browser, I just use that on the computer most of the time but I crave portability and organization that the app does not accommodate.

This app is great for scanning books to enter into your LibraryThing catalog and for searching for specific titles in your catalog. If that’s all you want, then you’ll be happy with it. LibraryThing’s website has so much more, including tags, reviews, and recommendations, that it’s frustrating to me that none of it is available through the app. You won’t browse your catalog, find suggestions for other books, or find reviews of books in this app. I was hoping to have that functionality since the website has it and since I was planning to switch to LibraryThing from the other bookish app I’ve been using. Unfortunately, while the website is great, I’ll have to stick to the other app for browsing and checking reviews when I’m not at my computer. This app is really only going to be useful to me for scanning new books into my catalog.