Hi, my name is Brian Koser, and I have a prob­lem. I can’t re­sist used book stores, used book sales, flea mar­kets…to be com­pletely hon­est I even browse through the used books at Goodwill. 😳

Sadly, Melissa suf­fers from the same af­flic­tion. Happily, we com­fort each other by pur­chas­ing books. We’re up to 542 now. How do I know the ex­act num­ber? Let me in­tro­duce you, fel­low book-lover, to a handy lit­tle Android app: the aptly-named Book Catalog.

This app lets you cre­ate a per­sonal data­base of books. Books with an ISBN bar­code can be scanned in; you can also type the ISBN code or ti­tle to en­ter books. The other killer fea­ture for me is that it syn­chro­nizes with Goodreads, the so­cial net­work for read­ers. With Book Catalog I can avoid com­ing home with a stack of books, only to re­al­ize that we al­ready own half of them. That’s why my August cre­ators do­na­tion went to Philip Warner, cre­ator of Book Catalog.