Booklovers have various ways of doing this, and these often turn into rituals. A wonderful article by Rob Kaplan entitled “The Ritual" tells how he incorporates new additions into his library. It begins when he crosses a bookstore’s threshold and doesn’t end until he slides the book onto his shelves. In between, he checks the cover, reads the flap copy, scans the half-title, title pages, table of contents (if applicable) and first paragraph, and inspects the book inside and out to be sure it's flawless. Then he buys it.

Once home, “I gently remove my new  books from the bag,” he wrote, “. . . and bring up the acquisitions list on my computer. Each new title is assigned its acquisitions number—a consecutive number beginning with number one for the first purchase of each year . . . Then I bring up the database program . . . [and] faithfully fill in the author, title, city of publication, publisher and year of publication . . . subject matter, to three levels of specification . . .  as well as the book’s format . . . the date on which I purchased the book, the acquisitions number, and other miscellaneous information about the book. Finally, there’s a field for book’s ‘status,’ which I record as ‘To Be Read,’ ‘Reference’ or ‘Reserve’.”  

As Kaplan knows, keeping a database of books is a way of forging another connection with our books. (Or maybe it’s simply a justified obsession.) Regardless of the reason, keeping a list is important to many booklovers. Finding ways to keep a list is not hard, but finding the right "list"? Ah, that's trickier. But with the tremendous variety of programs out there, it is likely that each cataloger will find one to suit her.

Specific ones that I have checked out are listed below. Most offer free trial downloads. All of them offer a large and valuable number of basic features—importing information off the Internet for easy data entry, bar code scanning, adding books singly or in batches, some customizing abilities, various display methods and easy searching among others—so what you want to look for are things that are personally important to you.

BookCAT ($39.95)  is a Windows-based program with great flexibility and a comprehensive set of fields including, in addition to the usual, original title, translator, current value, awards, nominations, reviews, a loan module, five sort levels and more than 80 pre-defined report formats. You can store both covers and pictures of authors, and import the information into other applications.

Book Collection ($35 for the standard version and $49 for the professional) is a Windows-based program.  It is completely customizable with numerous fields that can be laid out in any way you choose. You can track loan histories and overdue books, print labels and even connect your records to a web site so others can see what you have. It is designed to work for church, school and public libraries as much as for home collections.  

Book Tracker ($10) is shareware for Macs. You can use it for 30 days for free, but after that you must pay the fee. It’s not the most sophisticated program on the market, but it is a decent basic one with sufficient flexibility for many. It can be customized to some degree. And like almost all of the others, it can download information from the Internet to make data entry easy.   

Booxter ($19.99) is a Mac program that terms itself “a personal librarian.” It has one feature I have seen nowhere else— a personalized book quiz using your own collection. You can import the information using various sources; if you see a book review you like you can include that too.  The ability to create unlimited book lists and your own layouts is marvelous.

Delicious Library ($40) is one gorgeous piece of software for Macintosh users. The designers depend on Apple’s creative abilities to make DL unique. In addition to all the usual things, you can also add a custom cover to a book from any online image; display an item in a different size (e.g., a mass market paperback formatted as a hardcover); or transfer its information to your iPod.

My Book Collection ($24,95) works for both Macs and PCs. This program is a bit different in that it combines organization software with a tutorial on book collecting. And because collecting often involves author signatures, this one has a feature that allows you to view more than 200 authenticated signatures, calculate value based on various factors and add up to three photos of each book.

LibraryThing (unlimited entries cost $10 for one year and $25 for a lifetime) is an online collection system that you can share or keep private. Your collection connects you to a “cloud community” of people who share your taste in books. It can also analyze your catalog and come up with a list of books you might like. This is a fun, wonderful and interesting place to post your library and meet booklovers with like-minded tastes.

Last up is probably the most popular program, and the one I finally selected: Book Collectorz. Though I only just received it and am still working my way through its learning curve, it has nearly everything I want. And I’m not the only one who is enthusiastic about it. Of those who responded to my call for interviews about book collection software users most now use this one.

“Librarinun,” also known as Victoria, has a delightful blog, Books & Coffee. In a recent entry entitled “It’s 10 pm, do you know where your books are?”  she wrote about her new fixation with Book Collectorz. “I push it on every booklover I know,” she told me. “They say, ‘I used to own [title], but I’m not sure if I have it now.’ And I jump in like a bad commercial with ‘You should get Book Collectorz!’ Then I hold the software up beside my face and flash a too white smile.”

Nicki Leone, who writes “A Reading Life” for BiblioBuffet, waxed quite poetically about it in an interview. It was so perfect that rather than sum up her answers I decided to present them unedited.

How long have you been using this software?
Oh, about three months now.

Why did you buy book organizing software?
Ostensibly, to have a way to list all my books. After 20 years in the business, I have, as a rough estimate, around 8,000 to 10,000 books—but it is hard to know for sure. I came up with that number by counting all the books I had on one shelf, and multiplying by the number of shelves in the house. I’d like to know exactly what I have. Having worked in bookstores all my life, I’ve worked with a number of book inventory and point of sales systems and I always envied their ability to call up information on any book with a few key strokes. I guess I’m a bit of a database geek, and a frustrated librarian of sorts. I love raw information, and I love how databases sort and organize information to make it useful for lots of different purposes. I especially love it when the information is book related since I have made a career out of knowing the gritty details of books: their plots and characters, their authors, their publishers, their subjects and all the other books related to them.

Why did you chose this over other versions?
Ah, that’s easy. First—it was relatively cheap. And secondly (most importantly) it was able to search various internet databases for information and download it into the database. The one thing that has always stopped me from creating even a simple database or spreadsheet list of my library is all the typing and data-entry. I had so many it was just too daunting to even attempt to begin. But typing in an ISBN and having all the Library of Congress information automatically inserted? Wonderful! I’m all about instantaneous gratification.

How do you use it?
Slowly! A friend also bought it (on my recommendation) and she scanned all of her books into it within a few days. I had an email from her the day after she installed it, saying, “I just entered 400 books!” I’ve had my software for around three months, and I’ve just hit the 300 mark myself. I don’t have a scanner, which slows things down a bit, but I also tend to linger over each book as I enter it. I get fascinated by all the LOC subject listings and tend to record all sorts of extra information as I create the initial entry (on the theory that, if I don’t do so then, it is unlikely I’ll ever return to update the record). So I spend a lot more time on each entry, putting in all the stuff that is interesting and memorable to me—not so much information about price or condition, but I supplement the LOC subjects, and add character lists, things like that.

What do you like and dislike about it?
Book Collectorz is very customizable, which is nice, and it remembers a lot of information about the book that I wouldn’t think to record, but would probably be useful—names of translators, if the book is part of a publisher’s series, (like Penguin’s “Classics”), the number of pages, its LOC Classification Number and Dewey listing—all stuff that might be handy but I would never have bothered to track it myself. And of course, it downloads a picture if it can find a jacket image, which is just icing on the cake.

But what I like best is the ease with which you can enter information that is important to you, the reader, not necessarily you, the collector. I already said there is a place to type in all the characters in the book—I never realized how many novels I had that featured Edgar Allan Poe as a character until I saw the ever growing list of them with this software! And to be able to enter the Table of Contents if you are so inclined only feeds my obsessive nature. You can design your own rating system for books (which I haven’t), and you can record your own thoughts about them (which I have). You can even note which books have been made into movies.

The one problem I ran into came with entering books that for whatever reason were not listed in the Library of Congress. I have lots of these, of course. Like most college kids I was dirt poor and haunted the used bookshops when I did my book buying. But if the software doesn’t find LOC information, it will go to other Internet databases like Amazon or Powell’s, in which case it downloads all the current listings for the title, and you have to search through dozens of entries to find the one that actually matches the edition in your hand. That took me a few days to realize, and I had to go back and re-enter a couple of titles when I realized I had downloaded information about the wrong edition.

What is the learning curve like?
Easy, but I am used to working with databases that track books so it is familiar territory.

Would you recommend this or not and why?
I would and have, especially for people like me who have large libraries and have been putting off the daunting task of creating a record.

Why did you choose to use book organizing software?
When I feel the need to justify the expense and the time I spend on it (especially the time)—which I admit, isn’t often—I tell myself “Look, these books represent a significant investment, and are probably irreplaceable. You need to know what you have and how much it is worth if you ever want to insure them.” It is true that I live in an area known for its frequent hurricanes, and that if I lost my library in one bad storm I could never afford to replace it. The software estimates the retail value of the 300 odd books I’ve already entered at over $6000, which is information I didn’t really want to know. Does anybody ever really enjoy learning the full costs of their particular addiction?

But that isn’t really why I wanted the software. I wanted book organizing software because it helps me to better appreciate and understand my books. And my own literary predilections. It is self indulgence, pure and simple. I love reading. I adore beautifully written stories. Things literary are, as someone once put it, “what gets me out of bed in the morning.” A database of all my books makes it easier and more rewarding to enjoy them. It is forcing me to handle every single book I own once again—to look and think about it as I type in whatever information I find relevant. It is also helping me to see things about them I hadn’t realized.

Book Collectorz, for example, makes a distinction between “genre” and “subject”. “Genre” is where I would have shelved a book in a bookstore—where the main goal is to sell it. “Mystery, “Fiction,” “History”—those are all genres. “Subject” is what the book is actually about—as determined by the Library of Congress, usually, or its French and British counterparts. My copy of Sebastien Japrisot’s “A Very Long Engagement” could be put under mystery or fiction, but it’s subject is a variety of things, including “France,” “World War I,” and even “Motion Picture—France” since it has been made into a movie.

As a bookseller, I was often asked questions like “Do you have any novels set in France?” or “Do you have anything about World War II?” This is information most POS systems don’t really track. But now I can ask those questions of my own library and let me tell you, it is a real delight to be able to come up with the answers. So that is the real reason I wanted software to list my books (I won’t say “organize” because I’m afraid that shelving them is still a somewhat erratic and eccentric process). It is simply another way to wallow in all my lovely, lovely books.


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for a newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it