Book Collection

I've always been a big collector of books. During elementary school and junior high, that was my bribe for good grades. My parents and I had a complicated system worked out where each A equaled a book, being on the exceptional honor roll yielded two extras and so forth. I also got books at other times and could never wait for the library to get the latest Baby-Sitter's Club; I had to get a copy from the book store as soon as it was out. As I got older, I still tended to purchase books when Iw anted something to read. All of this has left me with quite the collection. (At least, quite a collection of pre-teen books.) I recently decided that I wanted to track the books I have in some sort of database, similar to the one Scott uses with his DVD collection. So I went in search of a program.

I had a few requirements:

• Ability to export to HTML. Scott's DVD list is available online and I want to be able to do something similar with my books.
• Ability to look up and download information about the books so I didn't have to type it all in.
• Nice-to-have - Books stored in a common format. I didn't want a program that stored books in some proprietary format.

I first went in search of freeware, but discovered that not much existed there. So I downloaded trials of several programs and evaluated them.

Library Express

• 39.99
• Stored in SQL. Up to date UI
• No export to HTML
• http://www.libraryexpress.net/download.html
  

BookCAT

• 39.95
• Look up by isbn. Data in access. Generates HTML pages. Very customizable. Export to HTML
• http://www.fnprg.com/bookcat/
  

BookCollector

• 49.95
• Export to HTML has a lot of options.
• Several clicks to import new books
• http://www.collectorz.com/book/
  

Book Tracker

• 14.95
• Doesn't look up by ISBN. All custom entered information
• http://www.ducksoftware.com/book-organizer.html
  

Libra

• Free
• Only exports to web view with links to Amazon and images of books
• http://www.bestvistadownloads.com/download/t-free-libra-download-mrwpeffl.html
  

Complete Home Library

• Free
• icky UI. No look up online
• http://www.pilibrary.com/
  

Libellus

• 14.95
• Kept giving an error
• http://www.tantillus.com/

I decided to go with BookCat, and so far I am happy. The customizable-ness is very nice. I've already made a few different views. I borrowed a scanner from work, but didn't have luck getting it to work. But I should be able to type in the ISBN numbers fairly quickly to import my books.