Adam and Tiffy

We’re both English majors. Everyone knows this. And we both have books accumulated before and after our college days, and new acquisitions seem to fill space as if the books themselves were breeding.

For quite some time, we’ve tracked our book inventory using software for the Mac called Delicious Library. It allows barcode scanning using our attached iSight camera, so it really cuts down on data entry time. We had some help with a big scan one summer from our niece, and the pile of books eventually looked like this:

We have one room we call “the library” in our fixer-upper house where we keep a giant bookshelf we purchased from the Helen Kate Furness Free Library for $100. It’s not much to look at, but it has capacity. (The room wasn’t much to look at either when we first bought the place, as one might see from the renovation photos.) The room also came with a big fireplace and we now have a player piano given to us by Tiffany’s parents. Her father restores musical instruments as a hobby. It’ll be a nice room one day once it’s organized and we put a few finishing touches. Although we call it the library, books are shelved all over our house — witness the recently completed shelving of Sci-Fi, Mystery, and Thrillers in our bedroom — and stacked in various places while we figure out what other shelves we need to get everything off the floor.

After years, I think we finally have a handle on the inventory. Here are some interesting facts I culled from the software and a little calculating:

Total Volumes – 2293

Hardcover – 21%
Paperback – 79%

Most popular genres:
Literature & Fiction – 34%
Romance – 20%
Mystery & Thriller – 10%
Science Fiction & Fantasy – 6%
Children’s Books – 4%

Here’s a pie chart showing a breakdown of genres (click to zoom):

I posted a browsable summary of our library contents as exported from Delicious Library. Ignore the total count of volumes, which is quite a bit higher than the actual number. It’s an artifact resulting from the reality that some books are listed in more than one genre and absolute numerical accuracy conflicted with the “smart shelves” that were listed based on genre. It’s kind of an interesting, browsable interface once the data exported, but there’s much more flexibility within the program itself for searching and organizing than there is in the web export. Maybe this presentation approximates the piqued interest one might feel from visually scanning a person’s physical collection.

We don’t count eBooks, of which I’ve probably purchased only a couple dozen using tools on the iPhone including Amazon Kindle for iPhone, Barnes & Noble EReader, and Stanza. We don’t count audio books either, although we have a few of those. I’ll probably never put non-physical books in Delicious LIbrary since each applications tracks digitally acquired books in its own way, which is good enough for now.

Tiffany reads at least twice as fast as me, so two-thirds of these are probably hers. She’s made some good choices, and more than once I’ve come across something while sorting that we already own that I’ve always wanted to read. I’m in the mode now where I only buy five or six new books per year, and it’s easy to go back to our own shelves to find something “new” of interest. Now just to find the time!