How to digitize your physical bookshelf with your phone

Why digitize your bookshelf at all?

If you've ever stood in a bookstore wondering whether you already own a title, you know the problem. A digital catalogue of your physical books means you can search your shelves from anywhere, avoid buying duplicates, lend with confidence, and actually see what you own at a glance.

The old way — typing every title, author, and ISBN into a spreadsheet — is why most people give up after a shelf or two. Barcode and OCR scanning removes that friction entirely.

Step 1 — Open the scanner

In Booknook, tap the scan button (the camera icon) from your Library or the search screen. Grant camera access the first time you use it. No extra app, no dongle, no subscription.

Step 2 — Point at the barcode

Hold your phone over the barcode on the back of the book. Booknook reads the ISBN and instantly looks it up across multiple book databases to find the exact edition — the right cover, page count, and publication details, not a generic guess.

For books without a scannable barcode (older or imported editions), you can scan the ISBN printed on the copyright page, or search by title and author instead.

Step 3 — Work down the shelf

Scan one book, add it, scan the next. Most people catalogue a full shelf in a few minutes. Each book lands in your library with its cover art, so your digital shelf actually looks like your real one.

As your library grows, you can organize books into lists and collections, mark what you've read, and set reading goals — all built on the catalogue you just scanned.

Bonus: scan quotes, not just barcodes

Booknook's camera does more than barcodes. Point it at a passage inside a book and it captures the text as a note using OCR — so you can save a favourite quote without typing a word. It's part of the same scanning workflow that makes building your library effortless.