Collectorz Book Collector

Collectorz Book Collector
www.collectorz.com

As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew,  I had the opportunity to review the Book Collector product from Collectorz. 

What is Book Collector?  Simply said it is an application that will allow you to catalogue your book collection the PC, Mac or online.   It will automatically gives you the details and cover art of your titles at the tips of your fingers.    The application is based on the online book database that collectorz.com has.   You can search this database by Author and Title or by ISBN, from any edition of the software.  The online database will instantly provide the following information:

• ISBN, Author and Title
• Publisher data and Publication Date
• Format, Genres, Subjects, Nr of Pages & LoC Classification
• Cover Images
• Plot summaries and a lot more

You can also catalogue e-books and audio book files by simply scanning the folders on your PC.   

A feature that could be interesting for everyone who has many books is the loan feature.  This feature allows the owner of the books to create a new contact to whom you wish to loan a book.   You can also decide how long the person can borrow the book.   Just for fun I tested this feature and was a bit disappointed when I didn’t get a message from the program telling me if a book has not been returned.  And I can not print a list of the loans made…

The first thing that struck me while I was discovering the product is that in the list of books I had entered the title of the book appears twice in the content view.    I wonder why this is the case.    I was also disappointed with the fact that some of the titles I entered had no images linked to them and in some instances the book wasn’t even list on that online book database.   I must admit that the database I created was called homeschool and listed the books we had for homeschooling.   

The program comes with the ability of changing the language of use.  Currently the languages available are: English,Nederlands, Deutsch, Magyar, French, Polski, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Hrvatski, Greek, Bahasa Indonesia, Norsk, Russkiy.

For fun, I decided to set the language to French (which is my mother tongue by the way) and product test it.    I was impressed with the effort made in the translation.  However, I was disappointed to see that some words in the menu were still in the “English” language.   Being French at heart, I find it important to have a product fully translated before I buy it.   You can see that the effort has been made but there are still a little bit of work to do.

Still the product has potential.   And the information can be transferred on your iPod/iPhone if you have the app for it.  

Want to buy Book Collector?   Here are the prices…

Book Collector Standard Edition   24.95$
Book collector Pro Edition   49.95$
Optional Extras:
CLZ Books mobile app   9.99$
Book collect Connect subscription (1 Year)   19.95$
CueCat – Simple CCD Scanner   19.95$
C37 – Efficient CCD Beam Scanner    79.95$
OPN-2001 – Deluxe Laser Scanner   139.95$

The company also have other “collector” software for movies, comics, music, and video games.  However, for each of these collectorz program you will have to buy it separately which because expensive when you have movies, comics, music, video games and books in your house like we do (do the math in your head!).   The idea is interesting but our family would prefer have a one-for-all type of program where we could manage everything in it.