Bookcat woes

[bookzombie]

I've been using Bookcat as my book cataloguing software for many years now, but unfortunately the person who produced it stopped selling and updating it a couple of years ago - although he has been keeping up maintenance on the dll to be able to download data from the internets.

I've been continuing to use I've invested a huge amount of time into keeping it up to date over the years, but I know it's been on borrowed time (for example, if I had to upgrade my PC to a later version of Windows I would probably have a problem.)

But this morning it look as if I might need to look at replacing it sooner rather than later. We've been doing an audit of the book collection and found some stuff missing. A couple of days ago I uploaded it with a few missing books and was going to do some more today. But for some reason in the last couple of days the option to download from the internet has stopped working - in that it is coming back with 'not found' for everything, even the books it found a couple of days ago.

Now this might be a temporary glitch and it will soon be working properly again, but if not I need to look at a replacement.

I've been having a look at trial versions and the only other one that comes close to the same functionality is 'collectorz' series of products. The main thing this has is it is the only alternative that allows you to specify the contents of books (e.g. in short story collections or magazines) and treats them as database items in their own right, not as text. It does deal with them slightly oddly in that you can have a 'contents' view, but if you double-click on the content item it takes you straight to the book it is in, not the content item, which makes it more key clicks to update than bookcat.

All-in-all I'm hoping not to have to change - it's going to be a lot of work and even the best alternative doesn't have as much flexibility, but I'll have to see what happens...

ETA: And since I wrote this, there's been a new dll for Bookcat which seems to have fixed the problem, so I don't think I need to worry yet!

Comments

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

I did have a look at Readerware a year or so ago, but I can't remember what I thought. I'll have to give it another look at some point.

Librarything is fine (I use it as a backup catalogue), but doesn't have the level of detail I like.