BookBuddy: My Library Manager 4+

This app is just great at what it does. After a little practise, the various menus and options become very simple to navigate and use. Different book categories can be set up to catalogue different book genres, subjects, etc., which makes searching your library a doddle. When using an iPad, the filters, categories and settings are shown on the left-hand side of the screen with images and details of the books on the right-hand side. Clicking on the book opens up more details and allows further editing as required. User images of books can be uploaded if you are not happy with the covers downloaded online. The app easily handles large book collections and syncs across devices, whilst backups of your library can be saved to iCloud or Dropbox.

Overall, this is a fantastic app suitable for users interested in cataloguing book collections of any size, be they printed or electronic copies. My only suggestion to the developers would be to allow the user to increase the size of the book images displayed.

Great app for categorising a diverse home library.

Scanning bar codes helps to speed things up, particularly with recent books where all the information seems to be accurate. Older books may need some details updating manually, but this is down to who put the information in the online database, and is easily corrected in BookBuddy.

Books without a barcode can be found by manually typing in the ISBN, or by inputting everything manually.

Photos of the book are sometimes automatically found (again, depending on what’s been stored on the web), but it’s really easy to take one of your own book to use instead.

Most of my books are non-fiction, some several decades old, and I can store all the details I need to both find my book in the house, and to use in a formal bibliography should I need to.

500 books done so far, done over about 3 days because of all the extra details I’ve included, but anybody that just wants to scan barcodes and accept the details could do the same number in a day, for sure. The few new books I’ve scanned have had all the correct details downloaded and stored within seconds, so once I have input all my old books, keeping it up to date should be really quick and simple.

Pity I didn’t find this app years ago......

I’d previously had other apps for my library of over 5000 books all of which either did not work 100% or stopped being supported and eventually failed.

I was therefore somewhat hesitant at first. Having used the free app initially I soon found it to be extremely functional as it does what it says on the label as they say.

Adding my first 30 books was extremely quick and hassle free, it found 28 out the 30. The two books it could not find were Rare books one from 1539 the other from a private limited edition collection, yet I was able to add them manually.

It would seem that the developers put a lot of though into this App and considered its design from a librarians point of view and requirements which is commendable.

It would be helpful though if BookBuddy could see which books I have in Apple Books (and other storage platforms) and populate the information into BookBuddy, as adding my entire collection of over 5000 books is going to be somewhat time consuming.

I highly recommend the Pro version as I believe anyone who would need an App such as this would own more than 30 books.