Obsidian Library
I gave up tracking my media consumption for 2025 and have so far done a good job staying away from the likes of The Storygraph and not obsessing over tracking every single song I'm listening to on Last.fm. I still track my movie viewing with Letterboxd but that's the bulk of it.
I've felt like doing some sort of logging. Not so much for quantifying, but to track what I have on my bookshelf to read, and the movies I want in physical form. I thought about spreadsheets, and then I learned about some plugins for Obsidian: Book Search and Movie Search. I included a third plugin, Dataview, that makes it nice to look at.
But because I don't want to do this for quantifying purposes I thought it might be a better idea to sequester this information to a separate vault. I created a new vault where these plugins live, and have two sections for books and movies. It's a simple matter of using the respective search plugin to find a specific piece of media and add it to my list.
For movies it's a Y/N if I own the movie (PURCHASE LIST or OWNED), and if I do own it, what type is it (4K, BluRay, DVD); and if it's ripped to Plex. I didn't include ratings or "watched" dates because that's what Letterboxd is for.
For books I opted to include a rating. It's for my own viewing pleasure; plus I can use Dataview to query specific books (5 star books, recommended books, etc) if someone asks me about something I've read that I'd recommend. That's the reason for it. Otherwise this library I'm building has no outward facing function.
When I set up the books part of the library, I got a little carried away - I added books read from the last couple of years. At first I wanted to add data for testing purpose and then I kept going. I reminded myself that I don't need the previous books, so now the only new books I'll add are the ones in my to-read pile at home.
That's where I'm at for now. I'll keep it for as long as it's working for me, but I won't hesitate to destroy the vault if it ends up being a time sink.
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