Book notes and book lists – how to stop them getting out of control?

Do you love books? I know I do.

Do you find yourself making note of books, and creating book lists that get lost? How do you deal with keeping track of the books you are interested in?

And I am always collecting notes on new books to check out, and creating book lists for the girls and myself.

Basically I want to be able to note down books, add comments, add them to lists, and have those lists easily available on this blog, with a link to the book on Amazon. And be able to access them from anywhere on my phone, so I can add books on the move, look them up in the bookshop and share booklists with friends.

So far I have been muddling along using Amazon Listmania.
This is a way of creating your own lists on Amazon, so others can see your recommendations. And if you run a blog there are  ways of adding the books to your blog with links back to Amazon – or you can create your own Amazon store. This sort of works, but has its problems.

  • Listmania is  hidden on Amazon. It doesn’t appear in the main search, so I find myself searching for listmania, and then searching the listmania box on the left. I even end up doing this for my own lists because although Wish Lists are easy to get to your Amazon profile and Listmania lists are buried rather deep in the site.
  • There isn’t an app that you can use to add books from your phone – which means I still need to note down books to add to Listmania later.  Amazon mobile makes it had to find the ISBN/ASIN needed to add a book. So I’ve been doing this using Evernote.
  • Also once you get past a small number of lists it becomes really hard to organise and look through your own lists.

I now have over 50 listmania lists and it is getting difficult to navigate through the pages of lists.
So my next job looks like it should be adding a list of lists to this blog!

How do you manage your book lists?