We where on the same boat as you at the start. We tried multiple iterations of different process, but in the end what worked for us was following:
1. Use a bar code scanner to scan a batch of books into a text file.
2. Wrote a small script to use Amazon API (this was when Amazon had a public API available) and Goodreads (this was before Amazon acquisition)(do you see the pattern :-) to search for the books. I heuristically merged the book data. We manually verified it and then pushed it to a sqlite db.
3. We spent weeks doing this, where everyday either of us spent at least 1 hour doing the scanning, verifying and importing it.
By couple of months we where done.
4. After that I exported it to excel so that we had multiple copies (Google drive and Dropbox)
Post that we tried various tools, like calibre, a custom application I wrote, etc ... But maintaining that catalogue or software was painful.
Challenges, we faced:
- Some ISBN's where not available.
- Mix of ISBN13 and ISBN10, but that was fixed in the script
- Older books do not have barcodes or worse have barcodes but are not ISBN at all (ISBN was introduced sometime in 1970). For these I used to enter the title and author and then used the search API to fill in the rest of the data.
- Some books stayed in the boxes. But they where scanned and put back so location was at least known!
You could replicate this with "Vibe coding" :-)
Currently we use [My library](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vgm.mylibr...)
It has a built-in bar code scanner using your phone's camera which we like. But many a times it pulls in a wrong book. It's easy enough to correct it though as the search functionality works really well.
Overall what really worked for us
- Putting aside some time every day to scan the books. Every day half an hour to an hour was doable and did not feel overwhelming. Otherwise the project looked very daunting. And over a period of time we made substantial progress.
- Now whenever we get books, first thing we do is to scan it. My partner is anal about it (thankfully)
What does not work for us still:
- Re-arranging books screws up the database. Now the locations are all wrong :-(
- When we where giving away the books, we had to export the data into excel and then share it via google drive for people to block it for themselves. We packed them but they never turned up for picking it up. These are still in boxes. We need to figure out a way for us release it and notify everyone that these books are back to being available.
Hopefully this inspires you to get those books out of the boxes at least once :-)