CNET Editors' review
Books is a free tool that can help you organize your book collection, acting as a sort of iTunes for physical books. This "virtual card catalog" lets you classify all the books you own using predefined fields (like title, author, publication date, etc.) or you can create your own. Books also lets you track and store summaries, cover images, personal reviews and ratings, notes on multiple copies of a single book, and more--and it even helps you track a book's lending history. "Smart Lists" (similar to iTunes' Smart Playlists) let you group books by any number of criteria (for example, by author, genre, or publication period).
By far the most time-saving feature in Books, though, is its ability to "quickfill" fields, using databases like Amazon's. That way, you can type in a book's ISBN, and Books will autofill much of the book's metadata and even pull in a cover image. Books also gives you export options in case you want to use your book list elsewhere, letting you export into HTML, PDF, onto your iPod, or even just as tab-delimited text, in case you want to drop it all into Excel or export to some other app.
In addition to being free, Books is also open source; if you're a developer, the sky is the limit for tweaking Books and creating localizations and custom plug-ins. The conscientious and responsive developer behind Books has moved onto other projects for now, but even in its current state, Books remains a solid option and a good value for users looking for this kind of app. Anyone experiencing stability issues should download the last stable release (3.2.4 for OS X 10.4+; 2.3.5 for OS X 10.3.9).
Publisher's Description
From Audacious Software:
Books is a native Cocoa application for Mac OS X that stores, sorts, and searches book collection information. Books assists book collectors with managing personal collections. For international users, Books supports a wide variety of international libraries for retrieving book information.
What's new in this version: updates the broken Amazon plugins.
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All versions:
2.3 starsout of 3 votes
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Current version:
3.0 starsout of 2 votes
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My rating:
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Results 1-2 of 2
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"Good freebie"
Version: Books 3.2.5c
Pros
Clean interface; good import and export capabilities; fast look-up; price
Cons
Slightly unstable with periodic crashes; poor cover look-up
Summary
This is a fine coding effort, now open source. It's far from perfect, but bear in mind there is nothing else free that can touch it on the Mac. The nearest competitor is $40.
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"Nice interface but not always great at finding the book"
Version: Books 3.2.5c
Pros
The interface is much like iTunes and that makes it accessible for most. I'm finding it useful to start tracking books I've read; that way when I'm uncertain as to whether I've actually read a book, I can consult Books.
Cons
The program doesn't deliver consistently and effectively with the Canadian versions of many books leaving me to spend time trying to find the book and the cover art.
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