Help & FAQ

Getting Started

Ex Libris Omnium is a personal library tracker for book lovers and collectors. Sign in, add a few books, and the app automatically pulls covers, authors, page counts, ratings, and current market prices.

New to the app? Trigger the in-app tour any time from the avatar menu in the top right ("Take the tour"). It walks you through the most useful features in about 30 seconds.

A few of the most useful features — barcode, cover, and multi-book scanning, the Values buy-scanner, and Get Physical — live in the mobile app; where that's the case, it's noted below.

Adding books

Choose "+ Add Book" in the top bar to open the search modal. You can search by title, author, or ISBN — results come from a combination of Open Library, Google Books, and our own database.

On the mobile app you can also scan books with the camera — see "Scanning books" below.

Have a Goodreads library? From the avatar menu, choose "Import from Goodreads" and upload the export CSV. Your shelves and read dates come over intact.

Manual entry is supported too — useful for rare or self-published books. Open the search modal and choose "Add manually" at the bottom.

Scanning books

In the mobile app, open the scanner from the Find tab. It has three modes, chosen with the toggle at the top.

Barcode — the default and most accurate. Point at the ISBN barcode on the back cover and the book is identified instantly.

Cover — for when a barcode won't scan (old, rare, or damaged books). Photograph the front cover and the app reads the title and offers candidate matches to pick from. It's a best guess, not an exact edition — if you can, point Barcode mode at the printed ISBN instead.

Multi — rapid-fire mode for a whole stack. Keep scanning barcodes one after another; each book queues up, and you review and confirm the batch at the end before it's saved.

Searching

Two search tools, two purposes:

• The magnifying-glass icon in the top bar (or Cmd+K / Ctrl+K) opens global search — looks across your library, public users, authors, and books in our catalog.

• The search bar inside Library filters only the books on your shelves.

Search is fuzzy: typos, partial titles, and partial author names all work.

Your library

Every book you own or want lives on the Library page. The four cards at the top show your current totals: in-library count, want-to-read count, retail value, and used-market value.

Filter by status (Reading, Read, Want to Read, In Library), group by shelf, genre, or author, and switch between grid and list views from the toolbar above the books.

Open any cover to see the book detail page, where you can change reading status, log progress, post a review, save quotes, and lend the book to a friend.

Selling a book

Sold a book? Use "I sold this book" at the bottom of its page rather than removing it. You can record what it sold for, where, and the condition — all optional, so you can just mark it sold and move on.

The book leaves your library and stops counting toward your totals and collection value, because you don't own it any more. But the record stays: open Sold at the top of your Library to see everything you've sold, with the price and date.

Your reading history is kept either way — a book you read and later sold still counts in your read stats and your Wrapped.

A sold copy can no longer be listed for sale, lent out, or dropped, and friends won't see it when they browse your shelves to borrow. If someone has an open request for it, marking it sold withdraws that request; if the book is already out on loan, the loan stays open until it comes back.

Removing a book from your collection is still there, and still deletes it outright. Use that for a book added by mistake; use Sold for one that genuinely left your shelves.

Discovering new books

The Discover page suggests what to read next. AI Picks For You are personalized to your reading taste (add at least 3 books to unlock them).

Browse by Genre opens a grid of books in any genre — a mix of classics and recent titles. You'll also find New York Times best-seller lists, new releases, and what your friends are reading.

Book values & what you paid

For every book in your collection we pull current retail and used-market prices, plus average rare/collectible prices when available. Totals roll up to the value cards at the top of your library, and each book links to a marketplace where you can buy that edition. Prices refresh in the background; if one looks stale, open the book and it re-fetches.

For books you own, you can also record what you actually paid — use "Add what you paid" (or the price with a pencil) on the book's page to log the amount, condition, date, and where you bought it. That's private to you, and it feeds an anonymous "Owners paid" median shown on each book, built from what everyone paid.

These are estimates, not appraisals. A price is whatever the marketplaces were listing when we last looked, so it moves with what happens to be for sale — and a book with only one copy listed is being priced by that one seller. That is how a common paperback ends up valued in the hundreds: a first edition or a signed copy sitting where an ordinary one would be. Each price shows how many listings it came from, and one listing is worth reading as a guess rather than a going rate. Treat the totals as a rough guide, not a figure to insure against — and if a price is wrong, use the pencil beside it to set your own. An edited price is yours and later refreshes leave it alone.

The Values scanner (scouting books to buy)

In the mobile app, the Values scanner (the diamond icon in the top bar) helps you decide what's worth buying at a bookstore, thrift store, or sale. It's a buying tool, not for cataloguing books you already own.

Book mode: keep scanning barcodes to compare resale values on the spot. Shelf mode: aim at a shelf that's for sale and tap "Scan shelf" — it reads every spine and ranks the books by resale value, or by how well they match your taste. Check off the ones you want to build a buy list, then add them to your wishlist.

Marketplace

The Marketplace lets you buy and sell used physical books with other readers. Open it from "Marketplace" in the navigation menu (the storefront icon in the mobile top bar).

To sell, go to "Sell a Book" and list a copy with its condition. To buy, browse listings and place an order with a shipping address; the seller confirms and ships. Track everything under Purchases and My Listings.

Tracking reading

Mark a book as Reading from its detail page and start a session whenever you read. The app times you in the background and saves total minutes, pages, and your current page when you stop.

Reading sessions feed your reading speed estimate, weekly stats, streaks, and the "Still reading?" nudges that arrive after 14 days of inactivity.

Want a weekly summary by email? Toggle "Weekly reading report" in your account settings.

Goals, streaks & Wrapped

Set a yearly reading goal — "Read N books this year" — from your Profile page, and track your progress toward it.

As you read you earn badges, level up, and build a daily reading streak. Your badges and level appear on your Profile.

Your Stats page includes Reading Wrapped — a year-in-review summary of your top genre, top author, and reader archetype.

Shelves & the Shelf Planner

Shelves let you group books however you like — by genre, mood, location in your house, or anything else. From the avatar menu, choose "My Shelves" to create and manage them. Books can live on multiple shelves at once; inside the Library, set the "Group" dropdown to "Shelf" to see your library laid out that way.

The Shelf Planner arranges your whole library into a virtual bookcase so you can lay out your real shelves to match. Open it with the "Shelf Planner" button on the Library page.

Set how many rows and columns your bookcase has and the planner distributes your books across the shelves by genre or your chosen order, then saves it to My Shelves. (In the mobile app you can also photograph a bookcase to size the grid, and photograph each shelf up close to fill it with your real books by reading the spines.)

Quotes & tags

Save memorable passages from any book — open the book and add a quote from its Quotes section. When you save one, you can tag it (funny, sad, inspiring, and so on, plus your own tags).

Browse everything you've saved on the My Quotes page, filtered by tag — so you can pull up all your funny quotes, or every passage you marked beautiful.

Friends, loans, clubs & buddy reads

Add friends from the Friends page or by sharing your profile link. Friends can see your reviews, quotes, and shelves (subject to your privacy settings).

List a book as available to lend, and friends can request to borrow it from the Loans page — you'll get a notification on each request. Book Clubs let you start group reads with discussion threads, polls, and shared pace tracking.

Buddy Reads let you read a single book alongside a friend — invite them, track each other's progress, and chat as you go. Start one from the Buddy Reads page, or from any book's detail page.

Accessibility

Keyboard navigation, focus outlines, screen-reader labels and pinch-zoom are always on — there's nothing to switch on for those.

Beyond that, Accessibility in the account menu lets you change how the app looks for you: scale the whole interface to 115% or 130%, turn on a higher-contrast palette, switch to a wider-spaced typeface, always underline links, reduce animation, and give every button a larger tap target.

These are stored on your device and affect only your view — nothing changes for anyone else, and you can reset them all at any time.

On mobile, Ex Libris follows the text size set in your phone's own settings, so make text bigger there and it's bigger here too.

Privacy

We don't sell user data — full stop. The app uses one privacy-respecting analytics tool (Microsoft Clarity) to understand which features get used, and you can opt out from the cookie banner at any time.

Your library is private by default. You can choose to make your profile public from account settings, which lets others see your shelves and reviews via your username.

Read the full policy at the privacy page link in the footer.

Need more help?

Email us via the Contact page (linked in the footer) and we'll respond within a couple of days.