Entrepreneur Geek

Nirav Mehta on life, technology and future

Organize your books collection – without tearing yourself

with 4 comments

I love books, I read some of what I collect! I may go from one book to another without finishing it. I love coming back to books I read earlier. Two weeks ago, I bought 26 books in one shot. The largest purchase of books I ever made. I was fulfilled!

My library case is already filled up and I needed a way to organize the books I have. I had tried with a spreadsheet earlier, but I wanted something better this time. I did not even want to type in all titles and details myself. That would be too much of work! I would rather read a book in that time!

Enter Books! A MacOS X application that can read barcodes using the inbuilt camera on my MacBook and fill up book details! Just what I needed! (It’s Open Source too)

Books - Add a new book screen

Books - Add a new book screen

I used it and I can describe the experience in one word – Delightful! I was so happy with the ease, I have already shown the app to my family. That’s unique – does not happen for a lot of apps!

  • It correctly detected ISBN for most of my books.
  • I did not have much luck with 13 digit ISBN – though detection worked, I was not able to find book information from Amazon/others.
  • Especially so with Indian publishers. For many, I had to enter the title and pull info manually.
  • I wish Gujarati books had ISBN too! Would have made it so easy! (I inherit a huge collection of Gujarati books from my dad ;-)
  • In just two hours, I could add about 90 books to the system! That was cool!
Books - Main Screen

Books - Main Screen

Related posts:

  1. Team: We need to improve quality of Gujarati translations Upgraded Firefox for my dad, and that led to this...
  2. Smart Usability: Remember password, not username “Remember Me” options typically remember both username and passwords. Some...
  3. Choosing an Open Source CMS – Book – Now Available My latest book – Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner’s...
  4. Typing in Gujarati was never so easy! Alan from our systems team sent me a note about...

Written by Nirav

November 9th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

Posted in Apple, Book Shelf, Recommended Reading, Technology

Tagged with , , ,

 

«
»

4 Responses to 'Organize your books collection – without tearing yourself'

Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'Organize your books collection – without tearing yourself'.

  1. Sounds interesting. Now how do you plan to use the data?

    I currently use Shelfari to keep track of what I am reading.

    Kapil

    10 Nov 08 at 4:45 pm

  2. Err. That means you need to buy latest Gujarati books. It comes with ISBN numbers :P

    Kartik Mistry

    11 Nov 08 at 11:43 am

  3. @Kapil: I did it primarily for fun! Wanted to know how many books I have! I also wanted to track borrowings – people don’t return a book after taking it. And it also gives me a good overview of what kind of books I have.

    I just added 530 book summaries to the collection today, and it’s looking nice ;-)

    @Kartik: Oh, I did not know that! Good development!

    Nirav

    11 Nov 08 at 2:46 pm

  4. I have tried it for 2 minutes and that barcode reading thing rocks!!

    Kartik Mistry

    11 Nov 08 at 11:19 pm

Leave a Reply