Adding Books
The ways to get books into your library — scan, search, type them in, photograph a shelf, or import a whole list — with a guide for each.
Scanning barcodes
Line a book’s ISBN barcode up inside the clear band and the camera reads it; a USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner has two modes of its own, Scanner to confirm each book and Rapid for a wall of them.
Finding a book and adding it by hand
The Add a Book page searches by title, author or ISBN, and takes a Library of Congress Control Number for older books with no barcode; anything not found can be typed in by hand. A book already in the AllMyBooks catalogue arrives at once, and anything else is looked up in the public catalogues.
Importing books
Import brings in a spreadsheet of books at once. Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing and Readerware exports are recognised and mapped automatically, any other file can be mapped column by column, and a UTF-8 MARC 21 file from LibraryThing or a library system is read record by record with a preview first.
Magazines
Magazines are catalogued issue by issue under the magazine they belong to — by hand or by scanning their barcode — and a bound volume of several issues is one record. Magazines & gaps shows which issues you hold and which are missing.
Capture a shelf photo
Instead of scanning one barcode at a time, take a photo of a whole shelf and let AllMyBooks pick out the spines. Each detected book is shown as a match, an uncertain guess to confirm, or a miss to skip, and you can fix the title or author before adding them all at once.
Each spine is looked up in the AllMyBooks catalogue first and, when the catalogue does not have the book, in other book catalogues, Open Library among them — so a shelf of books nobody has catalogued yet still gets matches, marked "New to AllMyBooks". A book is only offered when its title is actually on the spine and, where the spine shows an author, by that author; a title with no author printed beside it is only ever an uncertain guess. Nothing reaches your library until you add it.
Shelf-photo capture is shown only where your library has this enabled.
Choosing where it goes
Both scanning and manual adding let you pick a room or shelf for the new book, and set the copy’s condition. Your last choice is remembered, so cataloguing a whole shelf in one sitting doesn’t mean re-picking the location every time.
You don’t have to have set your rooms up first. Every location dropdown ends with "Add a location…", which asks for a name, what kind of place it is, and what it sits inside, then files the book you are holding there — so a shelf, a storage unit or a second home can be made at the moment you first need it. A library with no locations at all shows the same dropdown, offering "No location" and that one entry. For arranging several at once, Library Setup in your account menu holds the whole hierarchy.
Under those, a "This copy" section folds away what only some books need: what you paid, the list price printed on the cover, and the copy’s weight and size. It stays closed unless you open it, and a book added without opening it records exactly what it always did — cataloguing forty paperbacks in an evening shouldn’t cost a per-book tax for machinery only a collector wants.
Where the catalogue already knows an edition’s weight and size, those fields open showing them, so you’re correcting rather than transcribing. Leave a figure alone and nothing is recorded against your copy — it keeps reading the catalogue’s value, and a later correction to the catalogue still reaches you. Change one and it’s kept as a fact about your copy only. What you paid is different: it’s never pre-filled, because it isn’t something the catalogue can know.
Adding a book — by scan, search, manual entry, import, or shelf photo — is available to Library admins and members. Guests have read-only access and won’t see these options.
The want list
The want list is your library’s shared list of books you plan to acquire — including ones with no barcode, added by title with an optional photo. A scan or lookup says when a book is on it, "Check a book" finds owned and wanted books by title, and acquiring one asks you to confirm it is the edition you wanted.