Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / February 2008

In article
<alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>, Jeffrey
Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> wrote:

Have you looked at Delicious Library?

<http://www.delicious-monster.com/>

In article
<alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>,

Bookpedia is a lot like Delicious Library, for books.

My trouble is that most my books are old, and don't have ISBN numbers,
so there is a ramp-up of entering literally thousands and thousands of
books in.  Not totally by hand, it's search function is quite good.

But, for example, as a test I tried to enter the copy of The Voyages of
Doctor Doolittle that I got when I was a kid.  I was able to find many
versions, but not the one I had.

There are several programs in that area. One could also use a
general-purpose database such as FileMaker, but it can be quite a lot of
work to set such a thing up - a lot more than the modest cost of the
commercial solutions. I was debating doing that for a long time, because
I couldn't find any of the pre-designed solutions that handled one
things that was important to me (see below). But it was such a daunting
job that I never got around to it.

Long ago, I once did my own solution in Turbo Pascal, but that was badly
aging. It was Dos/WIndows only, and the compiler I used doesn't even
work on current WIndows versions, though the app binary still runs. It
never was nearly as fancy as the current commercial solutions, but it
did handle the basics of what I wanted.

Others have mentioned a few of the programs. I'll mention that I use
"Book Collector" from collectorz.com. It probably doesn't mater to most
people, but Book Collector is the only ready-made solution I've been
able to find that makes even a pretext of dealing with the contents of
anthologies, magazines and the like. I want to be able to search for
short stories and be able to find them.

As with most of the other solutions, you can enter books by ISBN
(including with a bar-code scanner), but a lot of my books are older and
don't have proper ISBN's, much less bar codes. Yes, initial entry is a
lot of work. But then, book collecting is sort of a hobby of mine. That
appears to be what it is designed for. I'm afraid there is no magic
solution that will know where all your books are without you doing the
work of telling it. :-( As you said, only a small part of the solution
is software.

It has a "location" field, which I've been using to indicate whch room I
keep the book at. I've been using one of the free-form user fields to
indicate the particular shelf.

I'm loving Librarian Pro. Incredibly close to Delicious Library but cheaper,
more memory efficient. It's main "drawback" is it doesn't use the built-in
iSight as can DL. Otherwise it can use scanners. It also can handle other
media. The "Pedia series" is neat but I hat having separate apps.

Too bad, you just missed a half-price sale. I got mine on a previous sale.

http://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro.php

indeed you need a system. I'd recommend Booxter as one of the most
professional librarian application, way older, more serious and more
efficient than all the delicious-library-likes that are barely more than
internet Amazon-searchers; there are others, including open-source
flavors.

At the very least, you absolutely need one feature: the way to
physically locate your book, and this must be incorporated in the
software.

Get one with either a "location" field in which you'll indicate where
actually you book is (with details: room, shelf, row...), or a
"reference number" if you prefer sticking increasing numbers at the back
of your books, or something like this (keywords...). Don't underestimate
this location thing, otherwise you'll end with only the knowledge that
you indeed have tihis damn book, but don't know where.

Check Booxter, http://www.deepprose.com

H.

<snip>

<snip>

Delicious Library will locate them within the house, but although I have it I
don't use it for books because so many of mine are old.  I use Filemaker Pro
for that; I bought a discontinued version on eBay because that was all I
needed and it was about half price if I remember.  Filemaker will sort much
better than DL IMO and will also produce more flexible reports.  I don't keep
the ISBN numbers of my books since many of them don't have them, but I do
keep year of publication.  You could easily add a field for "location" so
that you can find all books in a particular room.

[I print a catalogue of my books which I file in a small Filofax and take
with me to book sales - saves a lot of duplication!]

In article
<alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>,

Seems more like a "system" problem than a software problem. If you were
seriously troubled about getting your books under control, you wouldn't
have waited for apps like Books or Delicious Library. You would have
already had them in, say, a text file as CSV or similar, and doing grep
searches. Or you would have subverted iPhoto or iTunes as a catalogue
(iTunes actually works reasonably well for storing books you have in
PDF).

First step is to ask whether you actually have your books in any order?
If you don't, you probably should think about doing so. My science
fiction is all in author order, although I have hardcovers separated
out. My non-fiction is mostly in Dewey order.  There are separate piles
for To Be Read, and To Be Filed. That does help with searches. Every now
and then you need to reorder shelves, etc. On the other hand, since I
moved from a two floor home (containing around 10,000 books) and got rid
of most of my books, I have been less organised.

Data entry comes a lot later. To be honest, a big collection is really
overwhelming. I only broke the back of my data entry when a friend was
unemployed for an extended period, and crashing at my place. I wrote a
little front end to do CSV records, and I paid him to do data entry
(this was on a 1 MHz 6502 based OSI, back mumble mumble years ago).
Find someone who would work cheap, pay them by the book, not by the
hour. Enslaving children can work. Don't expect perfect accuracy. Do
make sure you put the books back on the correct shelves.

Whatever form the data takes, make sure the essentials from it can be
printed in a catalog you can take to sales and/or into Notes on your
iPod or PDA.

In article
<alpine.OSX.1.00.0802210854220.17240@hagrid.ewd.goldmark.org>,

My husband made a little Helix collection just for our CDs and DVDs but
he still buys duplicates all the time.  If he had an iPhone and could
store the list there, I'm guessing it would happen far less frequently.

Since we have thousands of books in our home "library", I can appreciate
your dilemma.  More recently, I've been giving some books away to others
who want to read them.  In turn, they read and give them away as well.  
Having had a large library for so many years, what has worked best for
me is simply keeping my bookshelves organized by topic.  Most of our
books are non-fiction.  Whether one uses my method or a software method,
it still requires putting the books back where they can be found again.