A couple of weeks ago I received an email asking me to review a computer program to catalog your personal library. I already had one on my computer that I liked so I thought why not. I had my husband download it into the computer and I started to play around. So here it is.
This program is one of the most user friendly programs for books that I have seen. There are a multitude of ways to import your books. You can either put in the title, or the author or the isbn. I found that the isbn was the fastest way to add books as you can add multiple books simple by checking the box for batch mode. You can put in as many books at a time as you want.
Editing your books is also very easy. One of the things that I liked was while I was in the editing book tab there was a spot for series name, where in the series the book fell, and also what format of the book you had. You can check all the sub-genres that you want. You can also click if you haven’t read the book and if it is a wishlist book.
If you are like me and lend your books to people and then forgetting who lent them to, this program solves this problem in that there is a place to check-out the book, it lets you put in the name of the person and when the book is due back, much like a library.
If you are like us in that I have my books, my husband has his books, we have family books and my boys have their books, and we don’t want them all together in one file as that can get confusing this program allows you to have multiple databases. Also because of the shear volume of books that we have it can take up a lot of space and this program allows you to compress the data so that you aren’t using as much space.
Once I was done playing with it I began to compare this program to others that I am familiar with, book hunter (which is solely for the mac and free), collectorz (which we have for our books and movies) I have to say that I really really like this program.
There was only a couple of complaints that I have and they were so minor that they aren’t even worth mentioning.
One of my favorite things about this program is that when you click on a book you can see everything that you need to know about this book right away without having to search for it. It shows what series it is in, what volume in the series, the publisher, the format, the year it was published, the author and the publisher. It also shows the isbn number and the book description. If you so choose you can also post comments about this book right on the page. Now most of this information you have to put in when you edit the book, but I found it was something that I could do.
I have to be honest here, we had originally wanted book hunter however as we are pc people not mac people this program didn’t work for us because it wouldn’t work on our computer, so we settled on collectorz mainly because we got it for free by joining the some program that we were already going to join. However after having this program we are moving all of our books into this program and going to delete the other one.
Now here is the part that can be frustrating, this program is not a free one it costs $34.95. Now I am a person that never pays full price for anything. If it isn’t on sale and I don’t have a coupon for it I don’t buy it, however I would pay money for this program. For those that don’t want to or can’t pay full price in looking on their website I found that there are ways to get this program for a discounted price.
I give this program a 5 out of 5
You can purchase the program here..
