How to catalogue a manga collection you already own

If you’ve been buying manga for a while, the collection probably grew faster than any list you kept of it. Cataloguing it after the fact sounds like a weekend lost to spreadsheets. It doesn’t have to be — most of the work is picking an order and sticking to it.

This guide uses Lorebound for the examples, but the approach works with any tracker, or with a notebook.

Decide what you’re recording

Before you touch a single book, decide what a “complete” record looks like for you. For most collectors it’s short:

• The series, under one consistent name.
• Which volume numbers you own. This is the part that matters at the bookstore.
• The edition, if a series exists in more than one format — single volumes, omnibus, deluxe hardcovers or a box set.

Prices, purchase dates and condition notes are nice to have, but they’re what turns a one-evening job into an abandoned one. Add them later for the books where they matter.

Work shelf by shelf, not series by series

It’s tempting to start with your favourite series and go hunting for every volume. Don’t. Volumes drift — one’s on the nightstand, two are lent out, one is in a box from your last move — and chasing them stalls the whole job.

Instead, take one physical shelf at a time, left to right. Catalogue what’s in front of you and move on. Gaps in a series will show up on their own once every shelf is done, and some of those “gaps” will turn out to be the books that were somewhere else all along.

Use the barcode

The fastest way to identify a book is the ISBN, the number under the barcode on the back cover. Modern books carry a 13-digit ISBN beginning with 978 or 979; some older printings show a 10-digit ISBN as well.

An ISBN identifies one specific edition of one specific volume, which is exactly what you want. In Lorebound, scanning the barcode adds the volume with its cover, series and volume number filled in. With Lorebound Pro you can switch to batch scanning and scan a whole stack before reviewing it, which suits the shelf-by-shelf approach well.

Treat each edition as its own series

The most common cataloguing mess is mixing editions: three single volumes and an omnibus that collects volumes 4–6, all filed under one name. It looks complete and it isn’t — or it looks incomplete and it is.

Keep each edition separate. A deluxe hardcover run is its own series with its own volume count, even if it collects the same story as the paperbacks. When you’re standing in a shop, “deluxe volume 3” and “volume 3” are different books on different shelves, and your catalogue should say so too.

Standalones and one-shots

Not everything belongs to a series. One-shots, artbooks, short-story collections and novels can sit in your catalogue as standalones. If you later buy a related book, you can group them — by author, by franchise, or however you actually shelve them.

When a book isn’t in any database

Small-press releases, imports and older printings sometimes don’t match anything in the catalogues apps search. Don’t skip them; a catalogue with holes in it is how duplicates get bought. Add them by hand with the title, author and volume count you know. In Lorebound that’s the “Can’t find it? Add it yourself” option at the bottom of search.

Check the gaps once everything’s in

When every shelf is done, go through your series and look at what’s missing. Some gaps will be books you own that are lent out or misplaced. The rest are your real shopping list.

Two flags are worth setting while you’re there:

• Out of print for series where the missing volumes are no longer being printed, so you know those need the second-hand market rather than a regular order.
• Dropped for series you’ve decided not to finish, so they stop showing up as unfinished business.

Keep it current with one habit

A catalogue only stays useful if new books go in when they arrive. The easiest habit is to scan a book before it goes on the shelf, the same way you’d take off the shrink-wrap. It takes a few seconds, and the next time you’re standing in a bookstore asking whether you already own volume 12, you’ll know.