The Home Library Problem Solved

Zack Grossbart writes "About 18 months ago I posted the following question to Ask Slashdot: 'How do you organize a home library with 3,500 books?' I have read all the responses, reviewed most of the available software, and come up with a good solution described in the article The Library Problem. This article discusses various cataloging schemes, reviews cheap barcode scanners, and outlines a complete solution for organizing your home library. Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer."

Pictures?!

[hansamurai]

I remember reading your original post and found it intriguing, great to see some feedback after it's all said and done. Anyways, I would love to see some pictures! I skimmed through your write up and found many of it interesting (I'll read it completely tonight) but I would love to see some images of your completed work. Maybe I missed a link or something though.

Dead tree format is dead

[BorgDrone]

I stopped using dead-tree books years ago, first I used a Palm III and later I switched to a Sony Clie TH-55. A lot of people are skeptical about e-books, saying it is uncomfortable reading from a screen but my experience is that the exact opposite is true.

The big advantages of reading e-books:

• The choice in books is a lot bigger, I prefer reading english books, mostly sci-fi and fantasy. In the Netherlands where I live libraries have a very limited selection of english books and hardly any sci-fi/fantasy.
  
• It's much easier to use than a 'real' book, I never have problems with light, with a real book I often find myself blocking my own light. My PDA has a frontlight (transflective lcd) and I never have to worry about light conditions. (e-book reader without some kind of illumination for the display = no go for me)
  
• Reading in bed, I like to read in bed on a lazy sunday morning. If you hold a book like an 'L' with the bottom part of the 'L' parallel to the surface you're lying on, you can only read the upright page. With a 'real' book, I often find myself having to turn around with every page.
  

I read "the god delusion" a while back which was (at least at the time) not available in e-book format, so I had to buy the dead tree edition. I was really surprised, after not having read a dead tree book for a long time, how annoyed I was by the limitations of paper books.

Re:There's this great new system

[TBone]

Except he excluded DDS explicitly, because it was difficult to subcategorize-and-sort below the general ABC.XYZ Dewey number.

Delicious Library + shelf labels

[UESMark]

I was facing a similar, but somewhat smaller problem (~1600 books) and worked out a solution using delicious monster. First off I segregated my hardcovers and paperbacks info fiction and non-fiction sections, then scanned them all into Delicious Library, a great mac app. It uses a video camera (I used a camcorder with firewire, but you can use a webcam) to scan the barcode, then gets the info on the book from amazon. Obviously the scanning is the most tedious bit, but since I had to remove everything from the shelves at some point anyway to sort everything it wasn't so ugly. After that was done I figured out how many books fit on a shelf (with some fudge factor) and made a label for each shelf showing what range of authors or subjects should go on that shelf. I did wind up with piles of books on my floor while I removed and reshelved everything but I had to do only a couple of shelf cascades where everything had to be moved down. After the shelves had the right books on them it was fairly easy to alphabetize on each shelf without a ton of book juggling.

Why is this tagged richbastard?

[evanbd]

Seriously, what the hell?

Doesn't everyone here have a hobby or two they spend a fair bit of money on? Perhaps it's your computer gear, maybe it's model airplanes, maybe it's your car or your audio system. Last I checked, an awful lot of geeks had a particular hobby they enjoyed and spent money on, and they don't have to be 'rich bastards' to do so. They just have to value enjoying themselves over... What? Hording money? So this man's hobby is reading and his library, and he enjoys organizing it in a creative way.

Sheesh.

Not a rich bastard

[bogjobber]

Someone tagged this rich bastard, but I don't think that's extreme at all. I've kept nearly every book I've ever bought in my life, and I probably have around 800. And I'm only 21 years old (thankfully my parents have an empty garage and I was reading from age 2). Depending on the submitter's age and if he/she is married to another book lover it would be very easy to get to that number.

This is slashdot, right? As in news for nerds. Do nerds no longer enjoy reading?

Re:Dead tree format is dead

[superwiz]

There are disadvantages, too though.

• You don't have a proper appreciation of how much or how little you are reading. Some people might think it's a plus, but other people need to manage their time more carefully.
• It's not as easy to take notes in e-books. So most books that require deep thought and pondering are out of the question.

Thank you!

[Fr05t]

It's nice to see someone actually follow up on an Ask Slashdot question and share the end result.

Dewey you fool!

[Joe the Lesser]

Your decimal system has played right into my hands!

Re:Kind of ridiculous

[rk]

There's more to cataloging books than just finding them. We've probably got only a couple thousand, but my wife catalogs them using LibraryThing [librarything.com] and also stores them in a local file. To my knowledge, we've never used either to find a book in our house, but these things give us:

• An easy way when we're out to see if we already own a copy of a book. LibraryThing has a mobile interface that makes checking with a cell phone easy.
• A document for the insurance man if we ever get hit by a fire or other disaster (you do offsite backups regularly, right?).
• An easy way of tagging books when they get packed for moves so that the library can be restored efficiently at the other end.

I agree that you don't need a computer to find a book in a collection of less than 10,000 books. If you can't organize those physically well enough to find them without a computer, a computer is just going to make it harder. Sorting by fiction/non-fiction and then by author is sufficient for us (with a special computer books section) to find anything pretty quickly. But it's pretty difficult to remember if you already have book sixty-two in the "Accordion of Fate" series or whether you have the third or fourth edition of O'Reilly's "Programming $ELITIST_LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MONTH" when you're out and about. And if you lose your whole collection, the chances of remembering the whole thing are virtually nil unless you have perfect photographic memory, in which case, why do you need to keep books around in the first place? :-)

And the flamebait mod for the parent post was unfair and I hope it's M2ed as such.

Re:You don't

[Hatta]

What's the point of reading books if you're not going to keep them for reference? I mean you can't remember everything that's in a book, hell I'm lucky if I can remember 10%. But I do remember what kind of stuff is in a book and roughly where it is, so I can look it up when I need to. I may never read a book from cover to cover twice, but there's still a lot of knowledge to be had by keeping it around.

Re:Dead tree format is dead

[JimDaGeek]

Electronic books still suck. They are device dependent and most importantly, DRM-encrusted.

A friend of mine can come over and borrow one of my ~1,500 real books.

They cannot do that with an e-book. They cannot transfer one of my "e-books" to their reader. I guess publishers want everyone that reads a book to pay? Hmmm. Am I the only one that has ever borrowed a book?

I personally was never into vampire books until my dad gave me a book of his to read. Guess what, since reading the one borrowed book, I bought about 12 vampire books.

Lending books without restrictions creates more profit. End of story. My aunt is big on classic works, works in the public domain. After she lent me two books, I paid for copies of several books that I can download free since they are in the public domain.

I am not trolling, e-books currently suck. The readers are crap, sorry kindle-fans, and the DRM/lock-down is not acceptable to avid readers. When an electronic book comes along that I can lend to a friend without it being tracked, then I might consider it. For now, I still want a physical book. I can lend out a physical book without some book company tracking it or putting a time limit on it.

Re:You don't

[TuringTest]

There are other books than reference ones, you know. Like, for example, novels.

If you read a book just for entertainment, there's no point in keeping it around once you know how it ends (unless it's really a classic that you want to keep for quoting passages, but that's not a high percentage of books for an average reader).

Re:Dead tree format is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

You very obviously only read fiction, or, at least, only read for pleasure. If you had ever been to University, or taken a book-intensive course (such as Philosophy), then you'd know that e-books and e-readers are hopelessly ineffective. Ever try to do a comparative textual analysis with your e-reader? What's that, you can only look at one book at a time? You can't write in the margins? You can physically highlight or bookmark a passage that won't disappear when the power goes out? What about dealing with original works, that are perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years old? Your e-reader only has a working lifespan of around 10 years, if that. When it's done, or when the disk has been wiped, or you suddenly can't access your DRM'd books anymore, the dead-tree variety will still be there.

Able to be read, reread, marked up, compared...E-books are, quite frankly, a joke when it comes to serious academic usage. There is no gain in having them compared with a well-organized library, and, in fact, there is a lot to lose by using them. The utility of the e-book is incredibly limited; effectively, only geeks like you who only read Heinlein or Rand can ever find use for it. For everybody else, the tried-and-true technology that has lasted thousands of years will suffice.

Re: Why is this tagged richbastard?

[ThousandStars]

To elaborate on the parent comment, they probably haven't spent all that much anyway, especially if they've been collecting books for more than 20 years; even if each book costs about $10 in today's dollars, that's about $1750 per year over 20 years, or about $875 per person per year. The yearly average could be a lot less, depending on how long they've been buying and keeping books, whether they habitually shop used, receive books/bookstore certificates as gifts, steal from the library or friends*, or whatever.

The submitter does sound like a very rich man: intellectually and emotionally, which I would always take over an Escalade [cadillac.com].

* Note to the humor impaired: this is a joke.

Re:You don't

[HybridJeff]

Following your logic there's no reason to ever buy movies either, because, hey you already know how its going to end. Now assuming you'll never read the book again then I guess there isn't much point to keeping it (aside from lending out books to friends and so on) but lots of people reread novels, and not just the ones that are worth quoting from. For the same reason that people like to rewatch old movies that they have enjoyed, rereading an old book years later, even if it wasn't some masterpiece can be quite enjoyable. In the worst case scenario rereading old novels you enjoyed is a better use of your time than watching mediocre reruns on TV.

Re:Why do you _need_ 3500 books?

[sootman]

I have quite a few books myself and I'm contemplating doing exactly this (except for about 50 books that are rare, super-expensive or used often).

As long as we're making value judgments for strangers, here's my suggestion for you: why don't you sell those last 50 books of yours and give the money to the homeless? If they're valuable, they're worth a lot! If they're rare, then those are the ones that it's most important that you not hoard, right? </smart-assery>

No one has the right to tell someone else what to do with their possessions. And who are you to say he'll never read them? Even so, a book's value isn't only in being read cover-to-cover. Maybe he refers to them every so often. Maybe he wants to keep them for his kids. Maybe he parades his friends through the house and they all borrow books all the time. He's going through great effort to catalog them. That implies that they see some use. If they just sat on the shelves, untouched, he could type up a list as a text file--hell, with a typewriter--and be done with it.

Besides, on a practical note, I don't think there's a terrible shortage of books in the world. I visit my local library often and the shelves are literally 99.9% full at any given moment. If you look at his profile, he's in freaking Cambridge, Mass. I think they're pretty well set for books in that town. And before the "send them to Podunk, IA!" responses come in: go back to my original argument--it's not up to you to decide what someone else should do with their stuff.

Re:IP business model

[tricorn]

What's fair about someone else having a say in how often I do something that doesn't affect them in the least? If they want to keep what they've done private, I have no problem with that. Once they release it into the wild, for whatever reason, they have lost control of it.

Should the worker in the plate factory be able to tell you what you can or can't eat off of "his" plates?

Ok, so you spend a day installing a beautiful new bathroom for me, and plan to recoup your time investment every time I use the toilet, wash my hands, take a shower (do I have to pay extra if their are two people in the shower? Do you get to watch?) ... what if I decide I don't like it after a week, so I get someone else to come in, knock it all out and put in a different one. Guess you're going out of business!

Per-use charges only make sense when each use actually "costs" something, and even then is inefficient if the costs of tracking and collecting the per-use charges are more than a very small fraction of the actual cost. The people who complain about "having to pay for" cable channels they don't watch are foolish - for most people, they'll end up paying MORE for the channels they do watch, even if the cable company doesn't make any more money. Making it pay-per-view would be even worse, at least from the standpoint of quality and creativity.