A few weeks back (Greenflame: Home Library Software) I started looking for some software to organize all our books at home. I had a look at various piece of software and settled for Booxter because it did what we wanted, ran under Jaguar (OSX 10.2) on the Mac and was inexpensive (NZ$22.50). One of the nice things about it is it supports access to online catalogues beyond just Amazon – so we can use Australian and UK ones which works out well with our mix of Aus/NZ, UK and US books.
So now we’ve started. 227 books catalogued. I’m hoping to scrounge a barcode scanner this week to zap the rest in rather than typing in ISBNs.
One thing it doesn’t do is other forms of media – e.g. DVDs. But you can download Books for MacOS X, an open source project, that allows you to enter an Amazon ASIN. If you do that for a DVD it sucks the data down with cover picture just fine. You could, suprisingly enough, use Books for the cataloging of books too but I’d need to ugrade to 10.3 to use the latest version. I’ll probably catalogue my videos and DVDs with it when we finish the books.
As for PC software to do that same thing, I didn’t find anything I liked (too expensive or really clunking interface) but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something good out there. If there was a Windows XP version of Booxter we’d probably get that too.
