Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets

I have more than 500 books too. I have tried using multiple platforms and I end up leaving them because they become a social platform or more than a simple book management. I don't have issues with that, but it's about how much time I want to spend on interacting with people. For e.g. my wife used to be very active in Librarything and Goodreads, but during covid and post covid, she has completely stopped using these platforms. So depending upon peoples needs the platform can become useful or time leeches. And it will depend upon what they need from it at that given moment.

Now, I have an excel sheet with all the books I have, and I don't see any way to import that list into the platform. I don't see myself sitting and rescanning or manually entering that list. For maintaining the library, i.e. whenever we buy books at that moment scanning or manual entry makes sense. But during onboarding I need an excel or csv import provision.

Currently we are using [My Library](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vgm.mylibr...), an android app. I am ready to move out of it as then the whole family can operate it.

Features I will like:

- Easy on boarding of a large collection

- Auto categorization. I don't want to sit manually and tag it or set the genre

- Multiple people be able to add and update a collection (Family mode)

- Borrow/Loaned status

- Books read but not owned

- Sharing the collection with closed group (friends and family)

- Sharing the collection with a larger community (if someone in the family is interested, but only in their profile and not all family members)

- Book recommendations (things that fall in my interest are fine, but also that surprise me). I miss the days when the book store owner used to remember us and used to recommend something which otherwise I wouldn't have picked up.

- And obviously able to export my data. I have been burned by enough platforms in the past 15 years that, this is necessary!

And I understand some features are already built by you, but as I was not able to play with the app (since I can't import any books), I have listed the ones that are important for me

I have been using zotero for this purpose. And I know it is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.

But it is pretty good at grabbing the book detail, and I have a bunch of custom fields and comments, and I can add other stuff into the book definition like text files and PDFs and jpgs and URLs.

You can also wholesale share libraries and create group libraries etc. But it is not very good at tracking read and unread status, let alone borrowed and returned. And it definitely doesn't give recommendations.

One of my main difficulties in moving from this to other media libraries is they are all each so focused on one kind of media. I find a lot of the things I want to keep track of, and share, and remember, are mixed media, authors who also paint, or website only books, multi media comics, films, art and literary theory. Not just the things that happen to sit on a shelf that I own. Which database does that music producer / graphic artist / film maker / author sit in my collection?

Thank you very much for this detailed comment — it is indeed very useful to me. The import feature is certainly on my radar and is something that I'll start developing very soon. You're absolutely right that it would make onboarding a large collection really easy. I'll take note of the other features you mentioned too. Thank you again!