I took time to catalog the household library, LibraryThing platform was very handy. Of course, my partner is beyond half of the collection, so I don’t have opinion on many entries. I will add index to the site later.

Books are a huge hassle to move house

I buy paper books. I love the concept of antilibrary - it is about accumulating the sources. But the freedom aspect is more important. I may drop a book in my colleague’s office or lend it to a friend, legally and with no petty criminal feelings. Second hands and digital marketplaces are good to grow and groom the library on budget, and books, being transferable commodities with no expiration date, are sustainable in a long-term - if that matters.

And a little on research papers - why do I use Paperpile

Foremost, from bibliographic manager I don’t really need the bibliography management itself - while in academia, I’ve been writing with LaTeX. Referencing was never a problem. If important, Jabref is a good software to compose .bib files, but I could get away with text editors and BibTeX exports.

Search, storage and annotation is a different story. I want access to my PDF collection, ability to read it, with flexible search queries on top and some way to list and categorize collection in a convenient way.

I have been using Mendeley for years, including years past its acquisition by Elsevier. I actually won’t rant on this topic, Mendeley did not become bad software. But I stopped using it, few serious reasons to do so can be found elsewhere.

Then there was Zotero, true FOSS solution. To make it clear, Zotero works very well, develops well, and has good integration with ample of other programs. Yet, in my use case there was a problem. On my computing devices, I tend to mix work and personal spaces - an unavoidable problem when subjects of interest and work-related tasks intersect. Thus, I use several computers - work-provided laptops, work-provided desktops, personal laptop and personal desktop, and a tablet on top. To build complexity even higher, platforms are different, some are jailed. Maintaining Zotero environment and multiple configurations is not that pleasant then - and in the end requires deployment of some cloud service across devices, which is not always possible nor recommended.

Since 2020 I am an avid Paperpile user, and it is the only subscription-based software I have, 3 USD/month as of October 2023. Paperpile is proprietary and web-based, requires Google account and an access to the associated Google Drive to store files (not an installed/rsynced drive, a giant plus!). These could make a big no-no to some people. I don’t mind, web service is the only solution comfortable with my workflow. The mobile application is very good, especially the annotation part. Little annoyance I face is the browser plugin itself, which is in turn the most essential part of the application. It works only with Chrome or Chrome-based browsers (works with Brave), but there are chances to fix it in foreseeable future.