Bookpedia’s purpose is somewhat dubious. Sure, it sorts your book collection and lists information like publisher, genre, page count, and summary -- but if you own the book, it’s probably already sorted on your bookshelf and you probably don't need a synopsis.
But like the feeling of pages on fingertips, there’s something romantic and desirable about Bookpedia. Adding books quickly becomes addicting and you’ll want to add each and every tome you’ve read. Besides scraping data and prices from sites like Amazon, Bookpedia serves as a digital trophy case to your literary accomplishments and can show you nifty statistics -- “Holy cow, I’ve read ten 1,000-page books!” And you can track which books you’ve lent out to your moochin’ friends, plus a wish list of books to buy next.
Bookpedia’s statistics are wide-ranging and completely awesome.
Unfortunately, Bookpedia misses the mark in several key ways. First, cover art is a mess of high-res/low-res product shots that screw up the beautiful cover flow. Second, the search is heinous. Many results, like Sin City, could only be found via a search for title -- not author -- while others, like To Kill A Mockingbird, had tons of duplicates. Finally, though a vast majority of books can be found through Bookpedia, not every book can.
The bottom line. If you're a digital bookworm, you want something like Bookpedia, whether you know it or not. Though for nearly 20 bucks, we wish Bruji had combined its other software (Moviepedia, Musicpedia, and Gamepedia) into one unified sorting utility.
Bookpedia 4.6.4
Mac OS 10.6.6 or later.
Adding books is addicting. Statistics are completely awesome.
Search lacks thorough sorting options and edition numbers. Pictures are a perplexing mix of high-res and low-res cover art.
Orac
November 11, 2011 at 1:26am
You might want to revisit the search facility. The search results are spot on, in my experience. It also has a capacity, just as you can do in Google, to permit search terms in quotation marks for a specific term such as a book title. This is useful if you start to do a title search containing common words and then have the need to narrow down the results.
The search box also has options to search just one field: title, author, ISBN and so on which is a fast way to eliminate the noise of lots of results you don't want.
If your BookPedia library has a mixture of high- and low-res images then would that not be due to you selecting those images to import to BookPedia the first place?
I found that one of the great strengths of BookPedia (and the family of 'Pedias) is that the fields are totally configurable and if your catalogue needs fields beyond the standard set you can easily add what you require. This is not a feature of most of the other catalogue software I examined.
Still, if this isn't required one of the simpler catalogues like Delicious Library might suffice.
hypersapien
April 29, 2011 at 2:17pm
that graphing feature does look appealing, but I dont think I would pay that price for it.
I've been a happy customer of Delicious library ever since version 1 however. I like its capability of publishing your collection directly to your mobile me account.
