Of several book-cataloguing programs I have tried out, eLibrary is, IMHO, the most outstanding. The author is a genius!

One correction to my prior review - this works with Windows XP and Vista - I don't think this works with Windows 7

The programmer of this little application has done a very good job; I've been using it for around 4 months now on an XP system (also works with Windows 7) and the more I use it, the better I like it. In my opinion, this is the best free ebook organizer currently available - it would benefit from the addition of a few features and being updated to work with Windows 7, but is still very, very good.

Detailed review:

If you have an ebook collection that needs organizing and are looking to use freeware, you basically have two choices - eLibrary (this program) and Calibre. Of all the programs I tried (and I believe I've tried every free applicable organizer on this site), those are the only two that (a) are sufficiently past alpha development that they actually work - and I mean at all - I was appalled at how many "programs" I tried had core functions which simply did not work; (b) are reasonably stable, i.e. the program itself may crash occasionally, but it won't crash your computer, turn your registry to toast, etc. and generally plays nice with your other little programmies; (c) can handle most or all of the different ebook formats and not just a few, i.e. .txt, .pdf, .djvu, .htm, .html, .doc, .rtf, .prc, .rb, etc.; and (d) can be configured to automatically download data from a variety of reputable websites to correctly identify and tag your books, including covers, short summaries of your books, author, publisher, etc. - an especially nice feature if you get most of your ebooks from Gutenberg, Manybooks, Baen Free Library, etc.

Both Calibre and eLibrary are excellent programs and I currently have both installed on my computers, have been using them both for around 4 months and find I prefer eLibrary for organizing books, although I am keeping Calibre for its other features and in the hope that it will improve as it evolves.

eLibrary is extremely stable, simple to use and configure and has an attractive clean layout and design - Calibre's layout is also simple, but many of the basic program functions are somewhat opague and required reference to the documentation before I could get them to work; sadly, Calibre is not nearly as stable as eLibrary - after some updates I could not get the program to work at all until the next update. eLibrary tags are highly customizable and can be set up in a tree hierarchy - among other things, I was able to use tags to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction, identify genres and create my own rating system from 1 (moronic) to 10 (transcendent) - it would be nice if the pre-configured tags included those 3 concepts, but it isn't necessary. In eLibrary, you can choose to have all your books renamed according to a specific scheme, or keep the titles how they are and you can also configure the program to monitor specific folders on your hard drive (or your entire hard drive) for books. Conversely, Calibre is very high-handed and will insist on moving all your ebooks and arranging them on your hard drive according to Calibre's own internal criteria - there is no way to get around this, although you can specify naming conventions similar to eLibrary; this is probably immaterial or even a great feature for most people, but was a deal-breaker for me as (a) I liked how my books were currently sorted on my hard drive and did't want them messed with, (b) Calibre was confused by multi-part html books and put the pieces in separate folders - what a mess. Both programs are good at pulling book summaries, covers and other data from the Web, but this is the one area were Calibre is definitely better. eLibrary primarily uses ISBN for getting book information off the web; the program will guess if there is no ISBN but guesses wrong more than it should, which means you have to manually correct a lot of entries - Calibre is better at identifying books by title and so guesses correctly more often.

As I mentioned above, Calibre is much harder to use and markedly less stable than eLibrary - I frequently am unable to get one or more of Calibre's features to work. Part of this is because while eLibrary does only one thing (organizes ebooks) and does that well, Calibre aspires to be an all-in-one solution - in addition to an ebook organizer, Calibre incorporates ebook viewers for several formats and can convert between a wide range of ebook formats (although I often find the conversion does not work, probably due to DRM on some of my ebooks or other factors) and transfer/format software to facilitate copying ebooks between devices in the optimum format for those devices. In support of its laudable ambition to be the vade mecum of the ebook world, Calibre is also being aggressively developed and updated by its creator, Kovid Goyal. All this change equals a better program in the long run but stability issues in the present. Calibre is getting better with each version and is deservedly popular on the various ebook forums such as Mobile Read.

But I just want a decent ebook organizer that is stable, where all the features are intuitive and easy to use and which will conform to MY criteria of how I want things set up, instead of expecting me to conform to it - and that's eLibrary.