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I need a free web application in order to organize a local book library. I mean paper books, not e-books. We used YouTrack for that purpose before, but it doesn't fit our needs because:

  1. Free version allows only limited numbers of users to be registered.
  2. We had to dedicate a server in order to host the application.
  3. We had to think of backups and other technical stuff.

How the process was organized:

An issue in YouTrack represents a book. Issue creator is an owner of that book; anyone who takes a book from the library assigns that book/issue to herself. In description we put some book summary.

Physically, all books are stored on a bookshelf at work.

I hope you got the idea.

So, the requirements are:

  1. The application should be free.
  2. It should be web-based (like Google Docs).
  3. Number of user accounts should be not less than, say, 500.
  4. We want to restrict unregistered users from modifying any book.
  5. We want be able to comment/like each book.

Google Docs is an option of course, but it is not very convenient to track all the transitions of books between people. In case of YouTrack, you should only press "Assign to me" button - and that's it. In case of Google Docs, you should type in your name into appropriate column.

As I understand, almost any free hosted issue tracking application should fit our needs. But we don't want to manage monstrous app like Redmine with Gantt charts, SCM integration, etc. We want something really simple.

I hope I put my question clear.

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migrated from superuser.com May 23 '11 at 17:18


closed as not constructive by Eight Days of Malaise, Barry Nov 23 '11 at 11:02


1 Answer

LibraryThing is free for up to 200 books or a one time $25 fee for unlimited books.

My wife loves it for cataloging all the books we own (and that's a lot of books!). It may be more public than what you're looking for and I'm not sure if it meets your other use requirements about number of users and sharing data (we don't use those parts).

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Actually it's not quite what suits us. We have phisycal, paper books to share between our group (~20 people). So each book has an owner (a person who brought a book into the common library), and a holder (a person who borrowed a book in order to read it and then return back). We don't want to have social book-sharing network. We'd like to have an ability to answer the questions like who holds this book, to see comments from people you know, and so on. So web app should be an advanced version of our bookshelf, not of National Library. Anyway, thank you for the answer! –  DNNX May 24 '11 at 6:04
Well... let me make a deeper look. I'll try this out and let you know whether LibraryThing fits our needs or not. –  DNNX May 24 '11 at 6:30
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