Post #848981

2026-03-29 15:24 UTC

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

Replies (6)

@mekki@mas.to 2026-03-29 15:40

@fooflington@infosec.exchange 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/

Open ##2425696
@pcfe@chaos.social 2026-03-29 15:47

@fooflington@infosec.exchange 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

Open ##2425697
@da5nsy@social.coop 2026-03-29 16:09

@fooflington@infosec.exchange It's designed to be social, so this might not match super well what you're wanting it for, but: bookwyrm? https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/

Open ##2425699
@jandi@mastodon.social 2026-03-29 16:16

@fooflington@infosec.exchange 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@fosstodon.org and has favorited this very post!). Hope it helps.

Open ##2425701
@gwenynen@toot.wales 2026-03-29 16:23

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

Open ##2425712
@unsoluble@mastodon.social 2026-03-29 20:51

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

Open ##2425713