LinLog

You know you're getting obscure books when even Goodreads doesn't know what the heck you're reading. Or maybe it's less that it's "obscure" than that it's "old".  And French.  It's hard to tell.

In this case, the book in question is "The Nature of Hinduism" by Louis Renou.  This is a book that's been sitting on my bookshelf for literally years.  I'm not even completely sure where it came from.  It has labels from the local high school library, so it apparently originated there.  I think either I got it at the public library's book sale, or it was left in our house and I found it when we moved in.

Anyway, Goodreads had no idea about this book.  It had a handful of entries for the author, but that's it.  So I had to add it to Goodreads.

This endeavor started off poorly because I decided to do it on my phone.  It turns out that the Goodreads mobile app doesn't actually have a way to add new books.  Neither does the mobile website.  The app has a feature to scan the barcode, but this book is 50 years old - it doesn't have a barcode.

If you want to add a book, you need to use the desktop site, which is a pain when you're using a mobile device.  Of course, once you're on an actual computer, it's pretty easy.  There's a "Manually add a book" link right on the search results page and it's fairly easy from there.  Some of the fields on the add form are a bit obscure, but most of them are optional anyway, so it's not a big deal.

I must admit I'm a little curious as to how much use the "manual add" page actually gets.  I'm sure it's not the most commonly used feature by any stretch of the imagination, but I would have expected it to be common enough to merit a link on the mobile site, if not the app.  Am I the only person left who reads used books that old?  That seems depressing.  Perhaps it's just that people who read old books tend not to use Goodreads.  I can only hope.