I recently came across a great program in my Mac-centric meanderings that promises to make short work of cataloging and organizing an extensive book collection. Called Booxter, published by Deepprose (www.deepprose.com), Booxter is as easy to use as iTunes, with the added benefit of filling in most of the relevant information fields for you, looking up genre, type, binding, and other useful information through a search of multiple sites, including Amazon.com and the U.S. Library of Congress.
The GUI is straightforward and simple, showing a column in the left-hand side of all the various libraries you create, much like the iTunes playlists. You can create just a library of your wife’s romances (you know you read them—admit it) or all the college textbooks that you’ve accumulated throughout the years. The main window contains a large-block table containing various fields, along with a shot of the cover of each book as a thumbnail. A very iTunes-like search field occupies the upper-right corner.
Double-clicking on the cover in the main window brings up a surprisingly-deep info window, with many of the fields already filled-in, but room for many custom fields and keyword or meta-tag spaces. Keyword and meta-tags? Would that happen to sync with the Spotlight in Tiger, you ask? Why, yes it does—Spotlight is able to find nearly any of the tags or fields you would like—searching for just Robert A. Heinlein books? Punch up Stranger in a Strange Land into the Spotlight box, and voila!—there is your entry.
The smart libraries can even be exported to a text file or to an iPod, for consultation or library-sharing on the go, making it useful for comparing libraries for book-swapping or even, using one of the fields provided, can be marked with a check for “Lent out” and lent to whom, as well.
Not looking forward to manually entering titles and ISBN #’s? Booxter supports barcode scanners and even firewire webcams like iSight for entering barcodes dozens at a time.
The best part of this comprehensive and eminently useful program is the ridiculously low price of only $14.99 from DeepProse.com and will make an indispensable addition to any home library. [Britt Godwin]
