Keep Your Book Collection Organized

I'm sure anyone possesses a smaller or bigger collection of books, regardless of their profession, hobbies or social status. Whether they have been bought, or given as rewards or as presents, the books you own represent a part of who you are. It's pretty easy to categorize someone by having a quick look at their bookcase (how many they own, the field they describe, the most encountered author, etc).

Unfortunately, if you own a larger collection of books, it's pretty difficult to know how many you have, where they are, how many you borrowed/lent, and other useful information. If your personal computer is a Mac OS X, then Book Hunter is the perfect application to install and start categorizing and cataloging you book collection.

The Looks

Book Hunter provides a very easy to use interface that is extremely similar to iTunes. So, if you use iTunes, then you should know your way around Book Hunter with your eyes closed. On the left side of the application, you are presented with a mini-window where you can choose to view your entire collection, the borrowed books or the wishlist. A simple click to select one of these categories and Book Hunter instantly displays all the books from that category.

The Works

The first step of using the application is adding a new book to the database. Simply open the File menu, or click the ì+ New Bookî button to open a new window and start entering the information about the book. Book Hunter is a book collection sorter and organizer, and in order to perform these functions, you will have to enter a lot of information on every single book. There are many fields to fill and this process may take a little longer than expected.

First of all, there is the basic information that is available for every book: Title, Genre, Author, Editor, Language, Cover image, Rating, Personal Rating, ISBN and more. If you select the Advanced Info tab, you'll discover another batch of fields that you can enter information into: Collection, Tags, Format, Length, ASIN, Date Acquired, Publish Date, Last time read, and so on. You can also enter similar information in the Lending History and Links tabs. You should know that all these small information fields will be very helpful when searching for a specific book, or browsing through a certain category.

A Smart List creates a new list of books with specific details. So, when creating a new smart list, you have to specify some criteria like: match any of the following rules or match none of the rules, where the rules represent a keyword that can be found in the title, genre, author, editor, tag, format, language, etc. Book Hunter instantly displays the books that match the criteria you have just entered. For example, if you're searching through your 500+ collection, and you want to find all the Jules Verne books that you own, then simply select match any of the rules, author contains Jules Verne, and all his books will be displayed in the main window of the application.

An easier way to add books to the database would be by using the Autocomplete feature. Using this, Book Hunter automatically searches the Internet and enters the right information, except for personal information like: personal rating, status, last time read, etc. To get the correct information for every book, you will have to install some plug-ins. From the Advanced menu, select the Plug-in Manager and you'll see a list of installed and un-installed plug-ins. These are very helpful when you want to search information on a specific book, and just can't find it.

From the Preferences menu of the application you can customize general settings, graphics, default values and date formatter. When sorting the books, Book Hunter can ignore some words like ìtheî, ìanî and ìaî from the title, and present a more accurate sort. In the Graphic Preferences window, you can set the font size, preview style and choose the preview fields that you want to be displayed in the main window of the application. The date format and some related options can also be changed, so you can feel as comfortable as possible when using the application.

The Good

Book Hunter is a simple and useful application that you can use to catalog, organize and sort you book collection. It is free of charge and you can use it as long as you want (for personal use). It also provides tons of features and sorting abilities that will help you find exactly what you're looking for.

The Bad

To be honest, I can't think of a single bad thing for this application. Book Hunter allows me to enter any piece of book information I want and even more.

The Truth

I think that you must have a rather large collection of books (more than a few hundred) to really make use of Book Hunter's full potential. The application is free, has many features, and it's worth trying.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: