Book Catalogue Project

I thought it would be a fun project to do a complete catalogue of all the fiction books I own. Armed with a book cataloguing app I set to work and diligently scanned barcodes or entered ISBN numbers like a fiend. The initial plan was to finish the entire process during a single weekend, but it took a tad longer than I expected. I managed one entire bookcase before I ran out of steam; 270 books and I wasn't even at the halfway mark.

Over the last week I managed to tackle the book piles scattered throughout my room and the rest of my bookcases (thankfully much smaller ones). The end result is that I now have a reasonably complete catalogue of my book collection and lots of interesting bookish data to play around with.

Aside from the fact that I seriously need another large bookcase the results were quite interesting. I own a total of 560 books by 164 different authors. Of those a whopping 76% (425) are still on my TBR-pile (this includes books I want to reread so the number is slightly inflated.

Science Fiction: 302
Fantasy: 165
Horror:25
Crime & Thrillers: 51
Other: 17

When sorting the books into genres it's extremely clear where my passion lies. Science fiction beats out all the rest by a huge margin. I was surprised that I own so few horror novels since it's a genre I really enjoy. The rest are pretty much as I expected with the 'Other' category acting more as a catchall for the books I couldn't define as a specific genre. I might refine the classifications at a later stage, but it's accurate enough for now.

The numbers for the different publishers and imprints are a bit of a mess, but at a glance titles from Tor seem to be the most popular followed closely by Orbit and Gollancz. No surprises there.

While the cataloguing project ended up being more time-consuming than I initially thought I'm glad that I went to all the effort. It gave me a golden opportunity to just revel in all my books and to rediscover the wonders that are patiently waiting on my shelves. My TBR-mountain remains daunting. Adding a concrete number hasn't helped things, but at least now I'm sure that I really want to read them and I have even discovered newfound enthusiasm to conquer Mount TBR

The catalogue turned out to be surprisingly handy. With all the hard work behind me I just need to remember to keep it updated...