The problem with this kind of tool is that it competes with Notes.app, Numbers.app, Google Docs, Excel, notepad.txt which are much simpler than remembering how to use some bespoke CLI app every time you finish a book and then figuring out how to back up the database. And being unable to log a book because you don't have your laptop around.

One idea is to use a spreadsheet as a back-end (like an iCloud-stored Numbers.app spreadsheet on macOS and a OneDrive Excel doc on Windows) with a simple human-editable structure, and your CLI tool is a front-end for interacting with it, exporting/importing from services, basically a value-add on top of a document that users could edit by hand.

Hey, this is cool! I’m working on an open source, self-hostable ebook library, made to solve the 80%-usecase of Calibre. I also built a command line interface to interact with its database, but this is stock-Full of nice ideas. I might steal some! :)

If you’re curious: https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri

(I have been working on this for years on and off, but now it’s finally going somewhere. Still not usable, though.)

It doesn't look like it can be used to track and cross-reference short stories.

Short stories can be stand-alone (web based), found in an anthology, a book collection or published in a magazine.

What would be nice is a tool to track where I read a short story (in anthology A, for example), and where the story can be found, which may be in more than one place (in magazine B, collection C, on-line, etc.).

This is, unfortunately, also not supported in many other book sites like Goodreads, etc.

I discovered Audiobookshelf over the weekend and it seems like the ultimate self hosted solution for audiobook and ebook management. Mobile apps, user accounts for the kids, great metadata support.

https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

A basic command-line tool to track your books read, show some basic stats and charts. All stored in a sqlite3 database and you can import from a Goodreads export CSV.

emacs already has an extension for this: https://github.com/lepisma/org-books

I've been using https://www.librarything.com/ for many years.

From the examples, it looks like this command-line tool should be able to be generalized to catalogue arbitrary data (retro gaming, tabletop games, movies, ...) with the same graphs/statistics/table, only with slightly larger overhead when querying the store. Along with a new command to create the catalogue and its columns of course.

    > catalogue new --numeric id, year, rating --text title, author
    > catalogue show --column id --value 123
    > catalogue show -c year -v 1984
    > catalogue report -c author (would show generic "Count" rather than "Books read")

I've probably forgot some things as I'm just typing this out loud, but that's my general idea?

Cool. I like using the cli for almost ever, but somehow for books, I gravitate more towards something with a GUI. I use Zotero nowadays; seems enough for now.

Is it beyond the scope of this project to also have synopsis and link to notes about each book?

Would be nice to link to reflections.

Additionally, any thought given towards incorporating standard cataloging systems like Library of Congress?

In case you are unaware, this shares a name with the audiobook seller Libro.fm.

Not really a contentful comment, but I wish I could still comfortably make time to read.

Zotero is cool. Hits some of the same requirements here, I think.

I was expecting command line financial software...oh well, maybe next time.