How I Used Airtable To Create A Book Lending Service For Free
Tags: tutorial, todayilearned
Published: 2020-09-16 21:14:40

I moved to my hometown due to covid-19. It's a small town in the foothills of Himalayas, called 'Kotdwara'. The view in the article cover is the one I grew up with.

I am not a voracious reader, but I try to read a book a month, which, over the years, have accumulated to ~100 books. But now that I've read them (and re-read some), what do I do with them?

I always wanted to setup a local library in Kotdwara. Growing up, there was no Amazon. There wasn't even a decent book shop where you could get some novel (isn't even one now). But, I don't want to be a book shop owner. Nor do I have a space big enough where people can come and read. But I do, however, have books.

### What if I created an online book lending service?
The idea was exciting, nobody was doing it in Kotdwara. May be there's no market for it, but I won't know for fact if I don't try.

So I decided to try it. My sister and I came up with the pricing, service flow and a poster that can summarize what we're trying to do.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/e9hyxvnykwygb9jk0fhv.jpeg)

Now all I needed to figure out was how to build that catalogue? I needed an interface that:
1. didn't take much time to setup & maintain
2. was web based (platform independent), and
3. Free

... I knew [Airtable](https://airtable.com/) from a recent freelance gig and I knew there must be something that could help me.

I logged into my Airtable account, and checked if they have something that could help me. To my surprise, there was a [template](https://airtable.com/templates/professional/expZvMLT9L6c4yeBX/product-catalog-and-orders) specially for this type of situation.

I quickly edited the template to my requirements and started filling the data for the books. I was afraid about my storage limits and affordability if I wanted to expand. Turns out, **I could store upto 1200 records and 2GB worth of attachments in the free plan.**

Next, I wanted a way to somehow show people if a particular book is available for borrowing or somebody has already borrowed it. Technically, I required a trigger mechanism. This feature has been added in the form of [Automations](https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360050974153-Automations-Overview) in Airtable platform which makes it really easy to create a trigger and do 'action(s)' in response to the triggers. Here's a screenshot of one of the automations.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/x2jhtmyr4rzeubenqx3u.png)

Although **there's a limit of 100 runs for these actions per month**, it'd mean that I could only use it for ~50 book lendings/returns but that was enough for a start. 

Now the only thing left was to create a view that our borrowers would see. Airtable has [gallery view](https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/220985047-Guide-to-gallery-view) feature where we can share whole, or part of our sheet, as a gallery. I used it to finally create our catalogue, [have a look.](https://airtable.com/shrCDJFDZDoictQqz)

**Thanks for reading, please follow me for more little stories like this one. **