Comment on I've been thinking about using a self hosted private book tracking tool in t
jarulf@mstdn.social 1 week ago @wil @bookstodon Do you use it to track your physical books as well?
I may actually go this route. I already use calibre on my PC and Calibre-web on a raspberry pi. I haven't used the latter much, except to download books to my Kobo, but if I could easily mark books as read on it that would be really nice.
Guess I'll have to actually learn how to use both Calibre and Calibre-web properly.
@jarulf I don't, because that's not something I've feel a need for. I have three Calibre libraries - one for ebooks I own, one to track my reading, and one that's my old tracking info imported from GoodReads.
I'm not a tech person but managed to customize each library for my needs. Calibre is very flexible and it makes me happy to keep my own information and not rely on yet another enshittification waiting to happen.
@bookstodon
@wil @bookstodon I'm not really a very techie person either, but I do dabble a bit.
It sounds like you have a great system, one that obviously works for your needs.
I've been using Calibre to keep track of my ebooks and "manage" DRM as well as to copy the books to my ereader, and StoryGraph to track my reading. I don't use the social features much.
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@wil @bookstodon
I'm starting to think my whole self hosting idea may be the wrong way to go, and I've been down this road before.
I made a post some months ago about simply using old style index cards for a catalogue and combining this with a simple book journal.
I know I'd be terrible at keeping up with the journal though, but it is probably the way I'd prefer to do this.
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@jarulf I'm using Openreads, it's not self hosting, but it's private, no socials, free/open source software, it's a mobile app. If you change mobile phones, you'll need to export, backup, and import into the new one.
It can add books by scanning the ISBN, it divides books by reading, for later, finished. It captures days of reading, it allows you to take notes, give stars, insert number of pages. It also gives us statistics, how many books we read, the book we took more/less time to read, number of pages read, by year, by month, etc. it also allows tagging to tell if it's paperbook, audiobook, eBook. I also use tags to tell if it's a library book or a book I own.
If you decide not to self host, maybe it can be of interest.
(I also use a paper reading journal for my notes, reviews when the books ask for them, an excuse to writing by hand, but this more practical information stays in Openreads)
Link to features and stores to download:
https://github.com/mateusz-bak/openreads
@wil @bookstodon
@jarulf @wil @bookstodon Please ignore if not interesting to you: I once was thinking about moving to a digital journal to make tracking easy and self-hosted for me. As far as I envisioned, it'd be a combination of a spreadsheet and a text document in my cloud: the spreadsheet for tracking quantitative information and the text document for writing down thoughts and adding pictures/doodles like on a mood board. 1/2