It is free and open source.
Another vote here for goodreads.
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Funny enough, I read mostly digital nowadays using Audible, Blinkist, Apple Books or Kindle. I have rarely started a book and thought to myself “have I read this before?” The tools keep good track on what I have read (and when) and haven’t failed on me once.
The main reason I use Calibre is that it gives me full control over book formats and device management.
I was a very active tracker in the analog world: books, CDs, DVDs and BluRays, most of which I do not use or own anymore. I needed my collection with me prior to shopping (especially during sales).
Re-reads in my world seem to only be intentional. More than once a Blinkist read has triggered me to actually buy/read the whole book (despite knowing the plot)
If you want a public place to track books, check out Micro.blog and its Epilogue app. Like GoodReads but your own data.
I’ve been struggling with many solutions. Until now Goodreads has always been my main system. My main pain with custom solutions has always been having to enter the book informations manually.
Obsidian however has some great workflows that make it such a joy to keep my reading list in it according to my own wishes. The workflow is explained here: https://github.com/Elaws/script_googleBooks_quickAdd
In short:
- Create a template according to your own wishes (I for example love noting where a book got recommended and why it appealed to me)
- Set up the quickadd plugin to automatically pull book information from Google Books into your own template
- Set up a dataview table to show your reading/read lists in a beautiful table
- Optionally: import your Goodreads csv’s using GitHub - farling42/obsidian-import-json: Plug-in for Obsidian.md which will create Notes from JSON files
Screenshot from my vault:
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Hmmm…there’s a website at your link. I thought it had died. Perhaps it was purchased and resurrected?
No, it’s sill going. But it’s really hard to use with a screen reader.
I still use it but don’t prefer it as a tracker for reading but more to catalog books I owned and books I have lend.
PS.
The dev, Wil Shipley now works at Apple.
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@Atom mentioned the app Book Track above. I recently started to use it as well, I think it’s a good solution across iOS and Mac OS. Your data stays with you and not on someone else’s server like Goodreads. The ISBN scanner is quite handy to import books. The app is relatively new but the developer seems pretty responsive.
App Store link: Book Track
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GoodReads is fine for this purpose, but I do not use it that much. What I do is when I finish a book I ask some of my friends what they have read.
I tend to just use an Amazon list. Vast majority of my (non-professional) reading these days is on Kindle so I find it easier to just keep on Amazon 
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Another vote for Reminders. I use GoodTask, which uses Reminders as a backend, and allows for a few different views of such lists.
I’m just reading through all the replies and pondering things, but this comment made me chuckle. It is the evergreen quandary with books. So many titles, so little time!
(Sidenote, my Pocket currently has over 5000 unread items in it and I calculated that even if I read 10 articles a day it would take me over a year to clear it. I’m on the verge of just declaring Pocket bankruptcy instead )
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I tested Obsidian last week and decided I didn’t need it in my life (I’m quite happy playing in DevonThink), but your delightful screengrab of your book vault makes me think I was too hasty…
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Well… I have my kindle books in 2 places. I use calibre to de-DRM all kindle books that have DRM, as a backup. I read them all on iPad. I currently use BookPedia to track all owned Kindle and paper books and one of the things is data on to be read or when I last read the book.
It does end up being basically a list with tags that allow sorting so may not work for you. OTOH the total library in Bookpedia as of the end of 2021 was over 3100 books and the to be read list at that time was at just under 600. I haven’t updated Bookpedia in a while, it’s a bit fiddly to do. So I have both all the books I’ve read to far this year and all the new books I have added that need to be either entered or updated.
I’m looking at some way to combine the list of books read, with my annoations (quotes and personal notes) and the books read or to be read into my Obsidian vault. Playing with both Readwise plugin (fails because it can’t handle anything but Amazon purchased books and a subscription) and the Kindle Plug-in, (same restriction on only Amazon purchases books but at least no subscription) and Zotero (wich has good links into Obsidian via Citations and other plug-ins but fiddly to get all )
May give you some ideas
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I didn’t even know this was possible!! 
All my software is up to date so looking at Calibre’s website I’d have problems with this, but it’s a tantalising window into a way to get my books out of Kindle. I HATE DRM on books (and I worked in a bookshop as a student!). Once I’ve purchased a book, it should be mine to play with as I like. If I want to stick it in a random folder in one of my apps, that should be my choice. In an attempt to reduce some of the friction with Kindle here, I am diligent about downloading all my highlights (I copy them to my PKM system, DevonThink, as Markdown) and I lean towards excessive highlighting in Kindle, more so than with other books, just so that anything of interest is captured and usable in other formats.
Not sure I understand why. I’m using Calibre version 5.42 with the following plugins installed
KFX Input 1.48.0 by jhowell
KFX output 1.58.0
DeDRM 7.1.0 by Apprentice Alf
Obok DeDRM 7.1.0
on both my macs running Catalina.
The source code is available on GitHub and it has decent plug-in support and a pretty active group of developers.
Despite mostly being proprietary I would use a dedicated app., as you are exploring already. Bookends is my choice, I think there are even cheaper or free ones, Zotero? And the more complicated to set up but open source LaTeX bibliography, which can produce a kind of plain text version of any reference. Every bibliography app I know of lets you group and sort in all kinds of useful ways.
I don’t want to pile in on Amazon but I just found a book I needed, an academic one, not cheap, on Kindle is just gooooorrrrn. 
There is a set of issues here which would take us into politics and off topic… I wouldn’t want too much under their direct and fiat control.
I have some other systems for finding references I have made in DEVONthink 3. Does anybody know a way to make Bookends searchable in Finder by the way?
I have dozens of references in hard copy in my planner and notebooks, a system I used since my twenties: I have an idea of time scale from where something is in the notebook. I actually read maybe 1% of what I have noted over the years, even then not often the whole book or paper.
The small number of books you need to keep track of should work ok in a notebook I would have thought? By the way the ‘citation industry’ is totally out of control and ridiculous now especially in the sciences.
I’ve tried it out quite a few time before it stuck. I takes some time to set up to your liking and you really have to enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff if you want to enjoy Obsidian to its fullest.
It does hurt a little when I look at native apps like DevonThink or Bear, but the possibilities of Obsidian are just so much bigger than any other (native) app.
One of my favorite uses is a ‘What to do’ dashboard. It shows me stuff like books/shows/comics I’m currently reading or watching. But it also suggests random movie/shows/books from my ‘someday’ list. And it shows three random topics that I started exploring that I may be interested in continuing. Now whenever I have some free time in which I don’t know what to do, I can just check out my dashboard and continue with wathever appeals to me.
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