Which app is best for cataloguing the books you own?

Do you need a catalogue or a reading log?

Ask what question you keep failing to answer. If it is "what did I read last year", you need a reading log. If it is "do I already own this" or "who has my copy", you need a catalogue. Many collectors need both, and that usually means two apps or one app used two ways.

What does a catalogue app do?

BookBuddy is the catalogue on our list. On the pages we read it offers:

• ISBN scanning, powered by WorldCat, with the camera or a Bluetooth scanner.
• The physical location of each book, and loans: who borrowed what.
• Stats for books finished and pages read.
• A library saved on your device, with iCloud or Dropbox sync.
• Import from Goodreads, LibraryThing and Google Books by CSV, and export as CSV, PDF, HTML, Excel and Numbers.

It is free with every Pro feature up to 50 books, then BookBuddy Pro is a one-time $9.99. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac with Apple silicon, and the current listing requires iOS 26.0 or later. There is no Android app.

Which trackers help with print books?

If you mostly want to log print books quickly rather than catalogue them:

• Goodreads, The StoryGraph, Literal and Bookly scan barcodes.
• The StoryGraph has an owned marker, so you can flag books you have on your shelf.
• Basmo has a page scanner for highlights.

These are logs that know a little about ownership, not catalogues. They will not tell you which shelf a book is on.

How do you catalogue a large collection without losing a weekend?

1. Start with one shelf, not the whole house. Scan it, check the results, fix the editions that came up wrong.
2. Decide your location names before you start: room, bookcase, shelf. Keep them short.
3. Scan in batches of twenty or thirty, then stop. A catalogue built over a month is still a catalogue.
4. Add loans as they happen, not from memory.
5. Export once a season and keep the file somewhere safe.

The print readers note covers scanning, cataloguing and keeping your place in a print book.

What about keeping your place in the books you own?

A catalogue knows where the book is, not where you are in it. For a long print book you dip in and out of, a pencil mark or a one-line note does the job. For supported titles, Magic Bookmark finds your exact place from a photo of the page and recaps the story up to there; its website says it works with the physical book you already own, any edition.

What should each catalogue record include?

Enough to answer the questions a collector actually asks, and no more:

Scanning the barcode fills the first four in most apps. BookBuddy records shelf locations and loans, and exports CSV, PDF or HTML, so the catalogue does not depend on the app surviving.

How do you keep a catalogue current?

New books are easy to add on the day they arrive; the catalogue goes stale when books leave. Two habits keep it honest: scan every new book before it reaches a shelf, and update the loan field the moment a book leaves the house. Once a year, walk one shelf at a time and fix what has drifted.

If you also read the books you collect, the catalogue and the reading log can be different tools. Many collectors keep BookBuddy for the shelves and a social tracker for reading.

Which setup suits a collector?

• Apple user with a growing library: BookBuddy as the catalogue, plus a tracker if you want social features or charts.
• Android user: a tracker with barcode scanning and an owned marker, such as The StoryGraph, plus a spreadsheet for locations and loans.
• Small collection: BookBuddy's free tier covers up to 50 books.

The tracker finder with Print selected lists every app on record for print.