It started with my own books.

I wanted a catalog of the books I already owned.

Not because I wanted to turn my house into a library. I wanted to solve much simpler problems: knowing whether I already owned a book, remembering who had borrowed one, and being able to find something without walking from shelf to shelf.

I tried the obvious approaches. A spreadsheet first, then several dedicated home-library apps.

The part that bothered me

Most cataloging apps begin with the same idea: pick up a book, turn it around, scan the barcode, and add it to the catalog.

That is perfectly reasonable when you are adding one new book.

It feels very different when the books are already sitting on shelves and there are hundreds of them.

I kept thinking: the titles are already visible. Why am I picking up every book one by one?

That became the question I wanted to solve.

So I started building Velato

Velato began with a simple idea: instead of starting with a barcode, start with the shelf.

Photograph the books as they are, identify what can be read from the spines, and turn that into a structured catalog.

Then the problem became much bigger

I thought I was mainly working on a book-recognition problem. Very quickly, I found myself learning about everything around it.

ISBNs are useful, but they do not magically make book metadata clean. Different databases disagree. Editions are messy. Covers are inconsistent. Older books may not have an ISBN at all.

Then there are questions that have nothing to do with recognition:

• What information is actually worth keeping about each book?
• Should the catalog mirror the way the shelves are organized?
• Does Dewey Decimal make sense in a home library?
• When is a spreadsheet still the best tool?
• How should you track books you lend to other people?
• Where do book apps get their metadata?
• How did people keep track of personal libraries before software existed?

Once I started pulling on those threads, the subject became much more interesting than the app itself.

What this site is for

Home Library Catalog is where I document what I learn while trying to answer those questions properly.

Some pages are practical guides. Some compare different methods. Some explain the data behind book catalogs. Others look at the history of personal libraries and the systems people used before computers.

I want the site to be useful to someone who simply has too many books to keep everything in their head, but also deep enough for someone who becomes curious about why book cataloging works the way it does.

A note about Velato

I built Velato, so I am obviously not neutral when I write about it.

I will make that relationship clear whenever Velato appears here. I will also say when I think another tool, a spreadsheet, barcode scanning, or a different method is better suited to a particular problem.

Detailed app comparisons and buyer guides belong on HomeLibraryApp.com. Home Library Catalog is about the broader problem: how to build and live with a useful catalog of a physical book collection.

An open-ended project

I do not expect this site to become definitive. The subject is too broad, and some of the interesting questions do not have one correct answer.

I would rather show uncertainty than manufacture certainty. If I test something, I will explain what I tested. If a claim depends on a source, I want the source to be visible. And if I change my mind about a method after using it, I will update the page.

Mostly, I hope this site saves you some time, helps you avoid buying the same book twice, and makes your shelves a little easier to understand.