When I lived in Japan, I wanted to start cataloging all of the physical books I had purchased over the six years I was there. Although it wasn’t practical, I built my own little library in my apartment and it brought me great joy. I wanted to keep track of my books because I knew that at some point, I’d have to return to the USA, and I needed to choose which books to ship back, and which ones to donate, and which ones I might want to repurchase.

After doing some searching, I came across the website Libib. It’s a FREE cloud catalog where you can log your books, movies, games, and more. It’s incredibly easy to use. The best way to add books to your list is to search via ISBN. Then it will populate book details, the cover, the author, etc.

I was able to catalog my English books with Libib no problem, but it wouldn’t recognize the ISBNs of my Japanese books at the time, so I couldn’t add them in. After all of my registering of my English books, my grand total was 193. I chose my few keepers to ship back to the USA, and then donated the rest to KumAJET for their annual charity book sale. I hope the books made them money!

I’ve kept the “English Titles in Japan” library in Libib all this time, not just to sort of reminisce about what I had when I lived there, but also, if I ever want to replace a book, I’ve got it in the list.

Since coming back to the States in 2022, I embarked on a huge project: a giant purge of books dating as far back as the 1990s, and the addition of my new English books, Japanese manga (in Japanese), and my doujinshi from Ikebukuro. Despite getting rid of hundreds of books, I’ve also continued to add books to my collection that have been pre-screened as eBooks and then selected as keepers to be repurchased in print. And then there’s the addition of a shelf devoted entirely to special edition books.

After swapping and updating, I knew I wanted to keep track of everything I owned this time. So, back to Libib and the creation of the list I call “My Literature Library.” And reader, it took me a really long time to gather the ISBNs on everything I owned and enter them into the system. Sometimes the books were so old that the cover image was unavailable, and I had to track down records of the book and manually upload the correct cover myself.

At first it was all English books only, then at some point Libib updated to allow books from foreign publishers. I went ahead and added all of my Japanese books, but had to input a lot of data manually. What’s so cool about Libib is that I have it set up so my books are alphabetized by author, and it mixes the Japanese and English books together in ABC order! My Japanese reading skills still aren’t where they should be, but from what I can tell, they are ordered correctly.

Wow, I own a lot of manga and manhwa.

Anyway, as of writing this today, I own 461 books total between English and Japanese languages. The only works I couldn’t catalog are my doujinshi, because those are fan published/privately published, and have no ISBNs with those.

It’s a great comfort to me to know I have (almost) everything logged and accounted for, not only to gaze with pride at my collection, but to have this data in case of an emergency where I would need to rebuild my library.

…Libib also lets you catalog media!

Over the summer and previous fall I started acquiring movies and anime series that I considered keepers and really wanted to collect. I own hundreds of DVDs and Blu-rays and thought to myself, well, I might as well catalog those, too. I haven’t logged any of my older stuff yet, but I logged the new stuff as it came in. At some point when I have time, I’ll get the rest of my collection entered in. Here’s a glimpse:

As you can see…I’m a huge anime fan.

Anyway, I wanted to sing the praises of Libib because I just added three more books to my catalog and thought that I should share this wonderful library program with everyone. I’ve been using it for years. I’m not getting paid for my endorsement of it; I just really love it.

Libib is honestly, truly free for people who want to track personal collections. They have a paid tier for users who want to run something closer to an actual library, with lending and patron and barcode management, for example.

I highly recommend using Libib as your cataloging program for your books, movies, games, and more. And if you feel like donating to them, you can do so here.