Books

I have a large library.

Frankly, what I have is a control problem in bookstores, but there are worse problems to have.

There’s a magical point in the book acquisition phenomenon where you truly can’t remember what you own. Therefore, when presented with a bargain on something at a used bookstore, you pounce, only to discover upon your return home that you owned the book already. Quite embarrassing.

To avoid this, I’ve tried cataloging my books in the past, but it’s just been too much data entry.

However, once again, the Mac provides a fantastic solution to the problem.

Books is a personal library catalog application. The beauty of Books is an extensible plugin architecture which has been leveraged to pull catalog information from what seems to be every possible online repository. Thus, by just entering minimal title information, complete canonical information about a book can be pulled automagically from a source like Amazon. If possible, Books even pulls in an image of the cover, which makes searching on the bookshelf that much easier.

Export plugins produce output for iPod notes, Palm organizers, PDF, and more. With a little effort, this should address my duplication problem.

Books is free and open-source.