My wife and I (well, mostly her) have a large and growing inventory of books. A couple thousand in the bookshelves. Aside from me having to figure out where to build more bookshelves into, another challenge we’re having is keeping track of what we have.

I’m no newbie to self-hosting, but it’s been mostly digital media. I got that stuff covered. Connecting into the house’s internal services is already solved too, so it’d be remotely accessible when we need it.

I’m looking for some recommendations on software that’ll allow us to build a card catalog of our inventory. The primary use case will be to be able to check if we own a particular book or not so that we know not to buy another copy when we see it at a book sale!

I’ve been to many book sales, and there’s a lot of resellers who swarm the place with barcode scanners that do automatic price lookups on Amazon and other marketplaces. They’re pretty quick, and I’d love to be able to use such a barcode scanner on our own inventory to quickly catalog the whole thing.

That all said… if there’s another 3rd party service that isn’t self-hosted, I’d be open to it too - but running it myself is obviously the first choice.

Open to suggestions!