MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Looking for an E-book Indexing / Inventory / Cataloging Program

catpower73 · 03-13-2010, 10:28 AM

A while ago, I was looking for e-book catalog software too. I found and tried "Collectorz.com Book Collector Pro" but it did not meet my expectations. It focuses more on cataloging books in general, and adds some support for e-books too, but it certainly is not the iTunes for e-books I was looking for.

Now, since I have a large collection of "technical" e-books (several 100) basically in two formats (PDF and CHM), I found another solution.

I created an XML-file with all the e-book's metadata (title, author, publisher, release date, version, ISBN-code etc.). It is simple and straight forward. I feed this catalog with metadata using a Perl script talking to the Amazon webservice. All it requires is the book's ISBN-number. The XML-file itself is turned into a human readable HTML-page using an XSLT stylesheet. That's it. If someone is interested, I'd be glad to post the solution.

I do hope that Apple will enter the world of e-book software with the release of their new iPad. I believe many people are longing for something like "an iTunes for e-books".

03-13-2010, 10:28 AM	#140
catpower73 Junior Member Posts: 6 Karma: 10 Join Date: Mar 2010 Device: none	A while ago, I was looking for e-book catalog software too. I found and tried "Collectorz.com Book Collector Pro" but it did not meet my expectations. It focuses more on cataloging books in general, and adds some support for e-books too, but it certainly is not the iTunes for e-books I was looking for. Now, since I have a large collection of "technical" e-books (several 100) basically in two formats (PDF and CHM), I found another solution. I created an XML-file with all the e-book's metadata (title, author, publisher, release date, version, ISBN-code etc.). It is simple and straight forward. I feed this catalog with metadata using a Perl script talking to the Amazon webservice. All it requires is the book's ISBN-number. The XML-file itself is turned into a human readable HTML-page using an XSLT stylesheet. That's it. If someone is interested, I'd be glad to post the solution. I do hope that Apple will enter the world of e-book software with the release of their new iPad. I believe many people are longing for something like "an iTunes for e-books".