Your Book Nest
TinyCat is the tool most small libraries land on first, and for good reason - it is simple, cheap, and built on LibraryThing's deep catalogue data. If you run a 20-50-patron church or community shelf and TinyCat is working, there is no need to move.
Switch to Your Book Nest when three things start to bite: you lend more than one copy of the same title, you want printed labels without buying them, or you want to try the tool properly before signing anyone up. Those are the seams where TinyCat's design shows its age, and where a copies-first, flat-priced tool fits a volunteer library better.
What each one actually costs a year
TinyCat is billed monthly in US dollars through PayPal, metered by collection size, with a separate rate for volunteer-run versus paid-staff libraries. A volunteer library pays $3 a month up to 500 items, or $4 a month up to 1,000 - so a roughly 200-item church shelf sits in the cheapest bracket at about $36 a year. That undercuts Your Book Nest's flat $60/year.
The gap closes once you look at how each price moves. TinyCat's climbs: past 500 items it steps up, and if the library ever takes on any paid staff or an acquisitions budget over 1,000 dollars, the rate roughly triples to $10 a month. Every duplicate copy you catalogue counts toward that collection-size meter too, so a multi-copy shelf reaches the next bracket faster than its number of distinct titles suggests.
Your Book Nest is one flat $60/year in your own currency, and it does not move. Not with collection size, and not with the number of copies. For a single-copy library at the bottom of the range TinyCat is cheaper on the sticker; the flat price wins on predictability, and on never being surprised by a bracket you crossed without noticing. The full picture is in what library software really costs and why library software is so expensive.
Multiple copies of the same book
TinyCat has no copies management. The Copies field on a LibraryThing record is a number you note for reference - it predates lending and never connected to it - so to lend or barcode two copies of a title you catalogue each physical copy as its own separate record. TinyCat's own staff have confirmed this for years.
For a shelf that only ever holds one of each title, that never matters. For a church or community library where a popular title arrives in threes, or a donor drops off duplicates, it means a duplicate catalogue entry per copy, each counting toward both the price bracket and the 20,000-item cap.
Your Book Nest is built the other way round: one record for the title, a separate copy under it for each physical book, and loans attached to the copy. A donated third copy is one new line, not a re-catalogued duplicate. The full model is in how to track multiple copies of the same book.
Labels and barcodes
TinyCat has no built-in label printing. It sells pre-printed barcode labels in the LibraryThing Store, or expects you to export your catalogue and mail-merge labels yourself, and a USB or CueCat scanner is an optional add-on purchase. Those are real recurring costs on top of the subscription.
Your Book Nest gives every copy a generated three-word code, like oak-bat-tree, printed on a label you run off free on blank Avery 5162 stock. Read it off the cover and type it - no scanner needed, and no account to look it up against. Copies you bring across keep whatever is already stickered on the book, in a free-text barcode field.
The LibraryThing account, and no demo
TinyCat rides LibraryThing - it needs an account, uses LibraryThing's cataloguing conventions, and editing the underlying catalogue or patron record bounces the librarian out to LibraryThing, a context-switch that trips people up. There is a free 30-day trial, but no instant try-without-signing-up demo.
Your Book Nest is standalone with one login, and the home page is a live demo library - add a book, give it two copies, and lend them to two people, with no account and no card.
Where TinyCat is the better choice
TinyCat's LibraryThing catalogue data is genuinely deep - covers, series, disambiguated editions, genres, awards, reviews and Dewey numbers - and Your Book Nest's cataloguing is deliberately plain by comparison. TinyCat also has MARC and Z39.50 import and export, a public online catalogue (OPAC) that patrons can browse, patron self-service accounts, a reservation feature, faceted search and reader reviews, plus a decade of track record and multi-branch support through TinyCat District.
Your Book Nest has none of those, and several are off the roadmap on purpose - no public OPAC, no MARC, no reading-social layer. If you want a public catalogue anyone can browse, cataloguing depth pulled from LibraryThing, or patrons managing their own accounts, TinyCat is the right tool and worth its price. If you are weighing lending on LibraryThing more broadly, whether you can use LibraryThing to lend books covers the wider picture.
How Your Book Nest helps
Your Book Nest is a dead-simple cloud library for a 20-50-patron volunteer library, at one flat $60/year. It fits the church, mosque, hospice or community shelf that wants copies-first circulation without a LibraryThing account, a scanner or a public catalogue to moderate.
Add a title once and give it as many copies as you own, each with its own three-word code and history. Print labels free on blank Avery stock. Sign in as many volunteers as you need, each with their own login rather than a shared password. Patrons get a read-only login to see their own loans, nothing more.
The home page is a live demo - no account, no card, no LibraryThing. Add a book, give it two copies, and lend them to two different people. If you run a church shelf specifically, the best church library software and the Librarika comparison sit alongside this one.
