I tried out Readerware at the recommendation of a few people, since I was looking for something that I could catalog all my books and media with.
The short review? It’s probably the best software out there to do it, but it’s not the best software I’ve ever used, and the Linux version is a bit buggy.
Ultimately I wanted to use the Linux version, since booting into Windows just to go through my collections is a pain, and would leave me never using it. So I wanted to figure out how to use the cuecat in Linux.
I did some googling, found 2.4 kernel drivers for the cuecat, information about modding the cuecat so it doesn’t encrypt, the cease and desist order from the company making the cue cats against the people “hacking” it and other information that was useless to me concerning the 2.6 kernel. Certainly people didn’t abandon it, did they?
Nope,
.C3nZC3nZC3n2Chf2Cxb2DxnY.cGen.ENr7C3r6ChTZChrZDG.
Cool.
So I get Readerware installed with the default java packages it comes with (figured there wouldn’t be compatibility issues this way, and I didn’t feel like installing java). It starts up with only a font error (which I’ll look into). The look and feel of the program needs some work, it’s unimpressive and sometimes not very intuitive. It’s one of those programs you can tell was written with java.
Now with my working cuecat, I choose the autocatalog feature, scan my first book and it crashes with a whole bunch of errors, seemingly stemming from an issue with the stupid noise it makes when you successfuly scan a book (error log here). Lame. And you can’t even turn that noise off, as far as I can tell. maybe it’s a problem with my sound? Maybe it’s a problem with that default java install or some path somewhere? I don’t know, and I still didn’t want to install java system-wide, maybe someday I’ll manage to figure out the issue. But for now? I booted back into windows.
The windows version is slightly cleaner looking, but identical otherwise. And I can export the data from the windows version, and import it into my linux install. Yay! The import and export functions on this are pretty nice, you can export as HTML, CSV, Tab Delimited Text, Palm and a few other formats I’m not as familiar with.
So I got to scanning my books. All my books. The majority have barcodes that Amazon (which I used for lookup) picked up with no problem. Some were older books that I just found a comparible ISBN on Amazon for and used. A couple books are so old that I couldn’t find ISBNs for immediately, but I’ll keep looking, might just manually enter them. So how many books did I manage to get entered? 247 paperbacks and 99 hardcovers (stats for hardcovers only say 46, but one “book” is a 54 volume set that takes up quite a bit of space in my livingroom, the “Great Books of the Western World”).
Scanning books is the funnest thing evar! Ok, maybe not, but I had a lot of fun, I’m such a library geek sometimes.
I had less luck with scanning my VHS and DVD movies. So mostly I just went on amazon and looked up their ISBNs.
And now for the results:
Paperbacks
Hardcovers
VHS
DVDs
Hopefully I can debug the Linux version eventually. But I’m so happy to have this inital cataloging finished %)