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[IDEA] Book Tracking 1.1

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Attronarch:
How about Zotero?

You can import by ISBN, add series name if it hasn't been pulled, define which tabs are shown, add your own notes and comments, etc.

It can be used completely offline (that's how I use it).

I don't think it can tell you about new publications.

Nod5:
Brainstorm: a minimal but maybe convenient enough book tracker could be pieced together from (1) a sheets app like Google Sheets (example) or Airtable (example) and (2) a script that takes ISBN etc as input and looks up data on worldcat or similar and outputs CSV data to the clipboard for manual pasting on a new line in the sheet app. Maybe Zotero and its browser add-ons can be used to fill the (2) role.

nickodemos:
Just tried Zotero and that's is not going to work, at least for this. I do plan on using it to track data I gather the net and sites I work on. Thanks again for bringing this up again.

After many years of logging information about the books I have read I do not have it in me to go through thousands of books again, with yet another program. My hopes is to find a simple book program that will pull the authors history (excluding non English translation) with the books separated into the series they belong. Updating it would pull new books to the series without the need of trying to track down each author every time I am looking for something new to read.

When you read as often as I do across many series being alerted to a new book in a series is pretty damn nice. Not sure how many times I forgot about following up on a series and then stumble over it again and find multiple books have already been published.

Just that almost every book program I have tried is just to damn clumsy or so filled with bells and whistles that it takes away from the simple joy of cataloging what I read.

Nod5:
Well the Airtable example base I linked does include a categories for series and more.

Quick GIF of that base here
https://i.imgur.com/uOTaqJc.mp4
and here's how the default form for adding new items manually looks
https://i.imgur.com/KwsA2Un.mp4

Though again if you want to avoid manual entry of new items (through a form) a script to scrape worldcat or amazon or ... is also needed.
Airtable free tier also has a limit on the number of items per base which might become an issue.

Attronarch:
Cataloguing is a solved problem. Bibliographic information is tied to the publication. Book catalogues use ISBNs, ISSNs, DOIs, and similar, as identifiers to which additional information is attached. There are additional systems, e.g. Dewey Decimal Classification, but they do not provide what you are looking for. Auto-updating is an undesirable feature in such systems.

To get what you want you'll need to cobble a custom solution, like the one Nod5 proposed. It'll still be difficult to precisely update new publications, as you'll probably need to automate finding something new by name, then look up ISBN, then check against all published ISBNs by the author, and then if it satisfies all of that it should be entered as new. Series data is also unreliable, as different publishers populate bibliographic data differently. E.g., when I work with books I rarely encounter series included, even if the book is part of them.

Have you thought about speaking with your local librarians? Perhaps at local university or public library? They might give you most relevant leads...after all this is what they are doing professionally.

Another option is building a catalogue in whichever software you like the most, and then having a virtual assistant check for updates every second week, or similar...

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