3 April 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 2 min read
Every reader has a mental list of books they've lent out and never seen again. That copy of The Name of the Wind you handed to a colleague in 2019. The paperback your sister borrowed "just for the weekend" three months ago. The novel you're fairly sure is still at someone's house, but you can't remember whose.
You can now tag each book in your library with an ownership status: Owned, Borrowed, Library, or Lent.
They all answer the same question: where is this book right now?
Owned is the default state for most people's shelves. It's yours. Physical, digital, tucked in a box in the attic, whatever. It's yours.
Borrowed is for books someone else has lent you. Useful when you're trying to remember what needs returning before friendships get strained.
Library covers books you've taken out. Same idea, slightly less guilt when you forget.
Lent is the one people have been asking about. You lent a book to someone and you'd quite like it back at some point please. Tagging it as lent means it shows up when you filter by that status, so you've got a clear list of everything that's out in the wild.
You can filter your library by ownership status from the library page. "Show me everything I've lent out" is one click. Handy for those periodic "right, who has my books?" audits.
If you've imported from Goodreads or StoryGraph, any books marked as owned on those platforms will automatically have the "Owned" status set. The other statuses aren't tracked by either platform, so those you'd add yourself.
This is one of those fields that takes five seconds to set and saves you from buying a second copy of something you already own but lent to someone six months ago. Not that any of us have ever done that.
