Books 101: Cleaning, Sorting and Cataloguing A Dusty Packed Library in Goodreads

One public holiday last month provided me with a dilemma – either I fix the leak from the washing machine that my wife has been complaining about or clean up my library and update the book catalogue at Goodreads. Image source: Good E Reader

In the end, I decided on the latter with the fix on the washing machine postpone to the weekends so that if something goes wrong, I can rush to the hardware store for replacement parts.

Read These First:-

• Books 101: The Beauty of Reading And Building A Library
• History 101: Japanese Fascinating Tactical War in Malaya & Singapore 1941
• Big Bad Wolf Book Sale 2013: Good Book Hunting At Wee Hours
• Big Bad Wolf Book Sale 2019: Good but Slightly Disappointed

Why I Opted for Goodreads?

For those who have not heard Goodreads, here is the snippet from Wikipedia:-

Goodreads is an American social cataloguing website that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogues and reading lists.

They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website’s offices are located in San Francisco. The company is owned by the online retailer Amazon.

(Source)

I have a lot of books in my “library” but it will take a lot of time and manual typing to catalogue the books in the library. With the Goodreads app, it is a matter of pointing the camera on the book cover or the book bar code and immediately Goodreads gets the details and updates my personal library at Goodreads.

Image source: Pexel / Photo by Janko Ferlic from Pexels

The Books That I Have Read

Whenever I usually keep these new books aside so that I know which next book to read once I finished the current book. So I thought I have read all the books in my library but surprisingly I found some books (about 20 of them) that I had missed reading. It has been lying deep in my bookshelf all this while.

A large of my collection touches on military, history, fiction and medical with a good number of comics from my children and cookbooks from my wife.  Of course, the above collection does not include some 100 plus Reader’s Digest magazines – I stopped the subscription when I found they provided a better offer to new subscribers than to their existing loyal customers.

Cleaning Up The Library

For this process, I had to empty the whole bookshelf (with the help of my daughter) and place all the books on the floor and under the fan. It is going to be a long day as I also plan to wipe & clean the bookshelf itself (it was dusty and I managed to kill off one book worm).

Books were sorted based on size, those that I have read and those with a proper book cover. Then I started to scan those books irrespective of whether I have scanned them before. I will later delete the duplicates in Goodreads using their duplicate checker tools. Those children books that my kids no longer read and where it does not interest me, I put them aside to be donated to a friend who has small children.

Reading a book may sound like old school considering we now have information at our fingertips and we don’t have to read to get the same information. We can watch and listen instead. But it will be a big loss when one does not have a library at home and pull a book once in a while. It jogs the brain in a far superior wavelength than just the television or the laptop.