...but even I am amazed. Heather introduced me to Book Collector, and I've been thrilled. I've long wanted to make an inventory of our books, and had made a few half-hearted beginnings, but the enormity of the project always dragged me down.
Enter Book Collector. I can use a barcode scanner (borrowed from Heather), read the UPC code on the back of the book, and Book Collector searches the Internet for matches. It downloads all sorts of information: cover image, title, author, publisher, summary, and often much more, depending on what is available.There's one problem: a large proportion of our books are too old to have UPC codes. But that's okay, I can enter the ISBN by hand, and then initiate the same search process.
We also have a large quantity of books too old to have ISBN's. For those the program will search on title and author.
There's still some of clean up that needs to be done with many of the book entries, and I've had to make liberal use of our scanner, because few of the older books have cover images available online. However, the process is so much faster than entering all the data by hand. A little concentrated effort over the past few days has enabled me to finish entering all the books—not that we own, but that are in one room of our house. The family room. It probably has the second-largest collection of books, although I won't be sure till I'm done.
But here's the shocker: I catalogued 263 books in the family room alone! I knew we had a lot of books, but that astonished me. I wish I could say I've read them all! I'm working on it....
I'm not ready to make the half-baked list public, but curious family members can see what I've entered so far via the Library link on our home page. You won't see all the nifty views and searching and filtering possibilities available in the program itself, but it's fun to browse anyway. The books (at the moment, anyway) are sorted alphabetically by author.
