Collection Management

I like to collect things, books, audio cds (which I buy exclusively second-hand/used then rip), and films.

I've had a lot of fun putting my film collection online (Warning image-heavy). Although I admit the reason I did it in the first place was because I found myself buying DVDs I already owned more than once.

I do the same thing with books. I can recognised covers easily, so if I see a book which is by an author I like I will look at the cover and think "Hmmm got this", or "Hmmm thats new". This leads me to buy duplicates too often.

This leads me to wanting to organise the hundreds of books I have, so I can lookup what I have/dont have easily.

My recent query the other day about scanning ISBN numbers with a barcode reader seemed to suggest that using the hardware is trivial. However the next step is hard. I can't find a decent tool for using storing the data in.

So far I've looked at:

alexandria

I loved this when I started it up and imported a few books by ISBN. It found the title, the publisher, a cover image, and more.

However the backend seems to be a bit hit and miss. Picking books at random I soon found major gaps.

e.g. Adding Terry Pratchett's Mort gave me all the details. Adding Witches Abroad gave a blank image and just the title, all the other details were wrong/missing.

tellico

Tellico I've just ruled out. It allows you to create collections of things, but you must enter all the details yourself.

I've neither the time nor the patience to do that.

So I'll postpone this project for a while. Probably just as well since I've discovered that a suprisingly large number of my books do not actually contain ISBN numbers!

Mostly the older paperback fiction books I have such as "H.G.Wells the valley of the spiders &; other stories", but even modern books like some of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series are free of ISBN numbers.

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