How to catalogue books to sell online

4 September 2026

You have books. You want to sell them online. Before you can list a single one on any platform, you need a catalogue - title, author, ISBN, condition, and usually a photo of the cover.

If you have ten books, doing that by hand is manageable. If you have a few hundred, or a few thousand, typing everything manually is not a real option. Here is the fastest way to build that catalogue without the data entry.

What you actually need in a book catalogue for online selling

Before getting into how to build it, it helps to know what the catalogue needs to contain. Most online book selling platforms ask for title, author, the 13-digit ISBN, publisher, year of publication, a condition you supply yourself, and a cover image the platform usually pulls from the ISBN.

Some platforms want more - Amazon adds a subject category, AbeBooks uses a condition description field - but title, author, and ISBN cover the basics for almost everything. The good news is that once you have the ISBN, everything else can be looked up automatically. That is the key to building a fast catalogue.

The fastest method: scan the barcode

Every book published after around 1970 has an ISBN barcode on the back cover. That barcode is the shortcut to everything else.

Point a phone camera at the barcode. A good book scanning app reads the ISBN and queries book databases to return the title, author, publisher, year, and genre - all of it, in a second or two. The cover image loads on screen. You did not type anything.

That is how TitleEntry works. You scan the barcode, everything fills in, you move to the next book. When you are done, you export the full list as an Excel file.

A pile of 200 books can be catalogued in an hour this way. Possibly less, depending on how fast you move.

Once you have the ISBN, everything else can be looked up automatically.

What about older books without barcodes?

If your stock includes books published before the 1970s, or books with damaged covers where the barcode is unreadable, a barcode scanner gets you nothing.

The first option is to enter the ISBN manually if you know it. Type it into the app and it looks up the book the same way a scan would.

The second is AI shelf scanning. TitleEntry can photograph an entire shelf and read the spine text - title and author - to identify books without any barcode at all. It works on old stock, foreign-language books, and anything else without a readable barcode. Either way, the unidentifiable ones get added manually. You fill in what you know and move on.

One method that does not work well: typing everything by hand

It seems obvious to say, but a lot of people start by opening a spreadsheet and typing. Title. Author. Publisher. Year. For every book.

Aside from being slow, the bigger problem is errors. A title mistyped by one character will not match when the platform tries to look it up. An ISBN with one wrong digit returns nothing. Manual entry that then needs correcting takes longer than getting it right the first time. The barcode scan approach bypasses most of this - the data comes from the database, not from you.

What format to export in

Most platforms accept CSV or Excel files for bulk uploads. TitleEntry exports a standard .xlsx file that converts to CSV easily in Excel or Google Sheets. Check the upload requirements for whichever platform you are listing on - Amazon, eBay, and AbeBooks each have their own template formats for bulk listing, and the data in your export maps directly to those templates.

After the catalogue

Once you have the file, the listing process depends on where you are selling. For Amazon, you use their bulk listing upload tool and map your columns to theirs. For eBay, you can list individually or use their bulk upload. For specialist sites like AbeBooks, they have their own upload format for sellers. The catalogue is the starting point - once it is built, the listing work becomes a formatting exercise rather than a data collection one.