Questions from careful collectors.

Yes. BookTrakdB is free to use as a home library catalogue. You can catalogue up to 1,000 books across all of your personal libraries at no cost.

You can catalogue physical books, eBooks, and audiobooks, along with the details that help you recognise and organise them—authors, series, narrators, genres, ratings, notes, cover images, and more.

Yes. BookTrakdB supports spreadsheet-based import workflows so you can bring existing records into your personal library. Download a template, fill in your books, and import dozens or hundreds of records at once.

Yes. BookTrakdB is designed to keep physical books, eBooks, and audiobooks together in one personal catalogue.

Yes. Export tools let you create a copy of your catalogue in Excel or CSV format outside the app.

Yes. A downloadable macOS application keeps a local SQLite-backed library available offline. It is Developer ID signed, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without Gatekeeper warnings. It is currently a manual-download beta, so keep independent backups of anything important while you evaluate it.

There are two downloads, one for each kind of Mac. If you are not sure which you have, open the Apple menu and choose About This Mac: it names your chip as either Apple silicon or Intel.

Download for Mac (Apple silicon) or Mac (Intel).

The hosted browser version needs an internet connection. The desktop app is designed to keep its local library available offline.

The dashboard gives you an overview of your collection at a glance. Summary cards show totals like book count, formats, and recent additions, while charts visualise format breakdowns, genre and sub-genre distributions, rating patterns, and acquisition trends. Everything is private to your account.

View screenshot

View screenshot

You can rate each book on your own 1–10 scale and optionally record an author rating. The dashboard charts your rating distribution so you can see at a glance which books you enjoyed most. You can also keep a Goodreads or other review-site score alongside your own.

View screenshot

Yes. A built-in User Guide, Error Message Guide and Troubleshooting section are available inside the app. They walk you through every part of BookTrakdB—from adding your first book and searching your collection to importing records, exporting data, and configuring appearance settings. The guides are always a couple of clicks away.

Yes. You can choose light, dark, or system-matched themes, and use Hide-Show controls to hide fields or panels you do not use. You can also choose colours for your main interface through the Appearance Settings dialog.

View screenshot

Yes. Record a loan against any book with the borrower's name, an optional email address, the loan date and any notes, then mark it Returned when the book comes back. Loans are a private record for your own use—there are no borrower accounts, reminders, or notifications—and a book cannot be deleted while it is out on loan.

Yes. Next Read/Re-read searches your own library against criteria you choose, then offers a single suggestion with the title hidden. Reveal it with More Details, or send it straight to Reading Now. Suggestions only ever come from books you have catalogued—nothing is recommended from outside your library.

Yes. Create your own tags with names and colours, apply as many as you like to a book, and filter the catalogue by one tag or several at once. Tags belong to your account rather than to a single library, so they stay with a book if you move it, and an Untagged filter shows anything you have not tagged yet.

Yes. Catalogue Columns lets you pick which fields appear in the catalogue and the order they appear in, drawn from everything you can record about a book. Reset to the defaults at any time. Your selection is remembered.

Yes. The hosted catalogue adapts to a phone screen with its own navigation, a compact catalogue list, and full-screen record windows. Barcode scanning uses the phone or tablet camera and is not available in the desktop app.

I’m a Kiwi with a background in IT, now living in Australia. I built BookTrakdB because I wanted a better way to keep track of my own books—especially audiobooks—and could not find quite what I was looking for online.

I thought other readers and listeners might find it useful too. There is something satisfying about making a practical tool around a subject you care about, then sharing it with people who may benefit from it.

BookTrakdB is free to use today, and I intend to keep it free for the foreseeable future. If that ever needs to change, existing users will receive clear notice. My aim is also to keep BookTrakdB free from advertising, affiliate links, and influencer promotions.

BookTrakdB is also my small way of giving back. Many people contribute their time and skills to make useful things available to others—from Wikipedia contributors to open-source software maintainers. I am grateful for that spirit and wanted to contribute in my own way.

I am not on social media, but you are welcome to use the Contact form in BookTrakdB to get in touch. I read every message and will reply where I can.

Further reading: Wikimedia Foundation and Open Source Initiative.