Hey y’all! I’m Robin Covington and I’m back to give you a peek inside the nerdiest corners of soul. I’m going to be here every month letting you peek into the nerdiness of my soul through my obsession with comics, graphic novels, podcasts, books, movies, TV shows and gadgets. Yes, gadgets!!!
This month I’m all about apps that make it easy for me to play librarian and sexy books about. . . you guessed it. . . librarians!
I think I first became obsessed with the power of a librarian when I fell under the spell of the public library. You’ve been there, too. C’mon, you can admit it. The moment when you realized that all you had to do to take home ANY BOOK in the entire building was to hand over your card to the all-powerful librarian. My love for the mighty-purveyor-of-all-the-amazing-books only grew when I saw Marian cast her spell over the cynical and fraudulent Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man.
Books were her superpower. Long live the librarian!
So, imagine the giddy excitement that made me squirm in my seat when I discovered several apps that could help me catalog my own book collection. (imagine a way to combine my love of gadgets and tech with my love of books. That’s just about perfect, ya’ll.) Apps that could enable me to keep track of books I lend. . . if I ever did such a thing.
I’ll give you a rundown on several that I found that are really easy and fun to use:
This is the app I ultimately chose to use to catalog my collection. This app is super easy to add books to my collection. You can do this either through manual entry, scanning of the UPC codes on your books with your phone, or by CSV import. You can have up 5000 titles on it and up to 100 distinct libraries, sharing with others, editing, reviewing and tracking progress, and cloud syncing under the free version. You can display your catalog in list form or by cover image. If you want up to 100,000 items and more items to catalog, you can join the paid version.
I love the ease of this app and the fact that I can use it on my phone or my laptop. I’m manually entering my Kindle books via their ISBN but I’m exploring how to collect that data via a CSV file.
This app is very similar to Libib, but I’ll admit that the aesthetic of the tool didn’t appeal to me. Call me picky but the looks of it just made me not want to use it. It has a free and paid version and has much of the same features as Libib, including sharing and scanning via barcode. It was a tad bit glitchy for me, the app shut down in mid-use several times, but I never lost anything I had entered. Again, it was just the look of the thing that made me cease using it. Your mileage may vary on the skin of the tool.
This app had the most connectivity with other platforms and had a pleasing look. It allows you to add books on manually, via an import, or with ISBN barcode scanning just like the others. It doesn’t have a free version but the cost $14.99 is reasonable and has no limit on the size of your library. It can also connect to Goodreads and give you reviews of your books. It was that type of connectivity that I didn’t want or need and ultimately drove my choice. It didn’t have a free version for a trial period but I used it on a friend’s phone and it was very easy to use on all devices. She related that it also had issues of glitchiness and a delay in cloud-syncing but that she’d never lost anything.
And now to my favorite books about sexy librarians. (You didn’t think I was going to pass up this chance, did you?)
Taking the Heat by Victoria Dahl is on my keeper shelf. Not only is the heroine fun and spunky and a survivor but THE HERO IS THE LIBRARIAN. Swoon. Sigh. Gasp. I did all of these things when I read this book. He’s a dirty talker, ya’ll! And since he’s a librarian, you know he knows his way around words. So, so good. Victoria Dahl at her sexy best.
Hard Time by Cara Mckenna is a hot, amazingly erotic romance. The heroine is the outreach librarian for a prison program. She meets the hero when he comes to one of her classes and they begin a mutual seduction via forbidden letters. When he gets early parole, they take everything to the next level. McKenna always writes smart romance and this one is one of her best.
That’s it for this month, friends! Hit me up in the comments with your methods for cataloging your book collection or your favorite books with sexy librarians!
Yours in nerdiness,
xoRobin
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