Book Collector
 

Does anybody use the program Book Collector (from collectorz.com) to keep track of their e-books? If so, could you let me know how you go about it.
Thanks.

isn't this a paid for service? From the blurb on their page this seems far inferior to Calibre, but perhaps somebody else here knows more by first hand experience.

I started with their free trial version years ago. I liked it so much I bought the standard version and went through a few upgrades at a discount price. It's a nice program and I enjoyed my time with it. Since I have been using Calibre I have not used book collector at all. Calibre, as it has already been pointed out by paola, is a much better program for collecting books. Kovid Goyal has been very generous with this wonderful, completely free program. It is a program that does much more than Book Collector and is easier to get started with. If that is not enough there is a Calibre community that contribute many plugins that can be added to Calibre to make it even more user friendly.

The only limit in Collectorz's free trial is 100 book limit. So, I would suggest you try both, the free trial and the completely free, unlimited Calibre.

Am I right in assuming that Calibre is for ebooks only?
Book Collector catalogs all books, both paper and ebook. So it allows you to manage your entire library. Does Calibre do that?

You can add records to calibre with no eBook attached to it.

Thanks, PeterT.
Meantime I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who uses Book Collector to manage their library... both paper and ebooks.

There's doesn't seem much interest in Book Collector but for the record... Book Collector supports epubs, but not kepubs.

Hi,

I've been using Book Collector to manage my paper books for years and it is an excellent product. When my wife got a Nexus for Christmas I had a good look at Book Collector's facilities for managing ebooks. Unfortunately it wasn't capable of managing ebooks in the way Calibre / Calibre Companion can, so I'm managing my ebooks with Calibre.

Having said that a new version of Book Collector was released yesterday and I haven't had a chance to evaluate any possible improvements that may have been introduced.

I wouldn't dream of using Calibre to manage my paper books and hope that BC will be capable in the future of doing what I need.

However that's from the perspective of someone who's collected books for years and uses a product that does exactly what I want it to do. I'd much rather have all (e)books managed by one product and whilst I can see BC becoming capable of managing ebooks, I can't see Calibre ever having the desire to manage paper.

Once I've had a look at the updated BC I'll post a follow up, if you like.

I have been using Book Collector for years, love the product, but as people have pointed out its more of software for managing physical "things". It lacks the loading, device management features that calibre offers, however you can link e-book files to the database record for each book (or e-book entry).

A present my e-book entries (I am using a separate database just for them) is not linked to the actual e-book files themselves. Calibre is so adaptive a skilled user could likely add most of the BC options, however since I BC already, am familiar with the interface, I prefer to put all the numerous details into it, and let calibre just manage the files and e-readers.

Thane1, How is the automatic search for books in BC now? Can you actually get ebook results when you use the search? I am a few versions behind and could only find paper book results in the search last time I used BC.

And on another note...tkavan, I feel I owe you an apology. I read your op to quickly and misunderstood, thinking you were looking for a recommendation. So please forgive my overenthusiasm for Calibre.

Not at all, gunbad. Always glad to hear other opinions.
And FYI as I noted above BC handles epubs, but not kepubs. So its value is limited in terms of managing ebooks.

You can but the majority of results are identified as hard/soft/trade paper/etc. books. The pure e-book results often don’t have much information when looking up with the ISBN you might only get the title author, cover art (which can be wrong), page number and format (e-book).