Topic: BookDB is Free book catalog software for Windows 95 or later

[Software Santa]

BookDB is Free book catalog software for Windows 95 or later.

Suggested by my dear Friend malephar! Thanx and a tip of the Santa's Cap!

With BookDB you can enter all your books with author, category, publisher etc and print them out in a variety of formats. Why would you need such a thing? Well, if you're always going to book sales and buying bargains only to get home and find you've doubled up, take a printout with you! BookDB has a super-condensed print mode so you'll need a magnifying glass, but at least it'll save a tree or two.

BookDB also has lending library features. With them, you can add borrowers, loan out books, add multiple copies and so on.

You can also import your catalogue from LibraryThing, which gives you a local, searchable database of your books. Whilst logged in to your LT account, click Tools and then "Export all records as tab-delimited text". Save the XLS file to your computer and then use BookDB's 'Import LibraryThing' to read all the data in.

Barcodes: You can use any barcode scanner with BookDB provided it sends the data as keypresses. (More information on this page - external link.)

I've been asked several times how many books the program can hold. In theory, over two thousand million. (When I was a kid, a billion was a million million. That's inflation for you.) In practice, if depends on the speed of your computer. For example, I have a database of 2400 books and my Core 2 Duo E6700 displays the lists in a blink of the eye. To test larger databases I generated one with 30,000 books, 15,000 authors and 3,000 publishers. It was certainly useable, although there were short delays switching lists. At the end of the day, it's a trade off - if the average database was something that large I'd rewrite the program to make it more efficient on big files. Of course, then it would be less efficient for smaller ones, and as it's primarily a home & small library program I think the current method is best.

http://www.spacejock.com/BookDB.html