Keeping Inventory of My Books

Is this something anyone else does? I have no idea. But with my obsession of spreadsheets lately, I decided to revamp my Book Inventory sheet. And honestly, it needed an update. I was a little behind on adding books into it, so I had no clue of exactly how many books I have. Honestly, I love keeping track of my books and knowing how many I own, as well as the ratio of how many I’ve read versus what I haven’t.

So, if any of you interested in keeping an inventory of your own, here’s the basics of how I track mine.

As you can see, I divided my books into categories. Maybe I used too many, maybe I didn’t. But for now it works for me, so this is how it’s staying. The sections I have are as follows:

  • Print Fiction
  • Digital Fiction
  • Manga
  • Print Nonfiction
  • Digital Nonfiction
  • Poetry
  • Reference (writing books, library science books, etc.)
  • Language (language learning/books in foreign languages)
  • Stats (of my library)

So I only include simple information, such as the Title, Author, and whether I’ve read the book or not. I used to include more info like the publish date of the book, when I got it (if I even knew), and more like that. But I found it to be tedious after a while, so that got cut from the new sheet.

When it comes to the Reference and Language books, I don’t count if I read them or not. Why is that? I figured that most books under this category are ones that I use more on occasion than actually read through, which is also why I don’t count these in my Reading Challenge for the year. I skip around in these books, so it’s rare that I read them all the way through.

Now for the stats… nothing too complicated. Again, I wanted this to be pretty simple. I mainly only have this to see how many books total I own, along with how many of my collection (minus Ref & Language) that I’ve actually read. As you can see… I have over 100 books I haven’t read yet. To be fair, I’ve been terrible this month with buying books, otherwise it would’ve been under.

So that’s pretty much how I keep track of the books I own. It’s simple, but it works for me. And if anyone wants to use my template, I’m leaving a (mostly) blank copy below so that you can customize it however you wish!

>>Get the Book Inventory Template here!<<

Have a great day my fellow book nerds!

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12 thoughts on “Keeping Inventory of My Books

  1. Fatma says:

    this is so cool!! im obsessed with stats and keeping track of my books so this is like the best of both worlds lol. have u heard of librarything before? its a website that i use to keep track of all the books i own – you can edit ur editions and tag ur books and everything and its like a lil library directory for all ur books ☺

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Rafaela | theportuguesebibliophile says:

    I tried making one of these last year but then I never updated it and I’m not great with spreadsheets, but I’d love to try and make another because it’s a great way to keep track of unread books. Thanks for the tips!

    Liked by 1 person

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