The other day, I was lamenting trying to properly catalogue and keep track of my books. I’d checked out LibraryThing.com; and while it’s very cool, it doesn’t have the functionality I need.
Perhaps four hours after the post went live, I got a Facebook message from a friend suggesting I try Books for Mac OSX. It’s an open-source program that some of his friends had tried and thought was terrific.
I spent a good chunk of Monday afternoon messing about with it, and it’s pretty phenomenal!
Check this out:
Adding a book to your library is easy-just input the ISBN and away you go!
Adding a title to Books is easy; all you need is the ISBN. Just type it in (or scan it using your webcam), press QuickFill and Books populates your fields from Amazon, ISBNdb.com or the Library of Congress.
When you’re done, you’ll have something that looks like this:
Your books can appear as a cover gallery, or as a list
Your books appear in an alphabetical (by title) list as a cover gallery, giving you a visual reminder of what each book looks like. Selecting a book brings up a larger cover image as well as the books details, including author, publisher, genre and publication date.
You can even check-in and check-out books so you always know who has them
Keeping track of books is pretty easy too; all you have to do is open up the book’s lending history, and add a new entry whenever someone borrows a book. This way, you never have to wonder whether or not a book’s still on loan.
Create Smart Lists based on the data captured in your records
One of the last neat features that I’ve picked up on so far is the Smart List. With these, you can automatically generate new lists of books based on any of the existing pieces of data in your library. So if you want to have a list of all books in your library by a certain author, or (for some reason) publisher, you can do that pretty easily.
So there you have it, book-lovers. Books for Mac OSX is a wonderfully simple application to use great way to keep track of books in a way that makes sense.
Give it a shot. I’m sure you’ll love it.
