As many people know, I have a great many books, audio compact disks, and DVDs. In fact, I have so many that I have to take a list of my DVDs and CDs when I go shopping, otherwise, I'll end up buying duplicates of what I already own. (Despite the reprehensible activities of those Luddites, the RIAA and the MPAA, I buy pre-recorded CDs and DVDs.)

I really like Filemaker Pro, but it has gotten to be too expensive to keep up with the latest upgrades, and anyway, the databases I create need to have all the data entered manually. This is not an optimal solution; I don't have a secretary or any keyboard entry operators to do this work for me. I want the software to do the work for me somehow. What about using the ubiquitous bar code to keep track of my stuff? (Note: There are a couple of fallacies with this question that I'll get to in a bit.)

Oh well. So I went looking for another solution, and one where I wouldn't have to work so hard entering data. It took me a number of months to find an acceptable solution, but you can imagine my happiness when I did. I downloaded the demo, and was impressed, so after I tested their product, I went ahead and bought their basic trilogy of cataloging products. Despite some shortcomings, the products do pretty much exactly what I want. And the price was right as well.

The basic product is called, like the company, Readerware, and it is a basic database for keeping track of your books. Hmmm - could this be why they called it Readerware? I wonder. Well, they also have, using the same basic interface, programs the will catalog your music, ReaderwareAW, and your videos, ReaderwareVW. While I will be discussing the basic Readerware program, most of what I write will apply to the other programs as well.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand: When you open the database program, you see a basic blank window with a lot of columns and menu items. After searching the icons and menu items, you can figure out how to add books. There are two basic ways of entering all the information, of which there is lot more than you realize. The first way to enter the data is manually; a long and tedious method that I'm sure will thrill masochists and other bibliophiles. As everyone knows, I'm lazy; I want the computer to do all the work for me, so I select Automatic entry.

When I click on the automatic entry icon, an auto-entry wizard pops up. The first screen asks what databases I want to query to get the data: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, the Library of Congress, the British Library, Australia's National Library, Norway's BIBSYS, and a few others. I select all of them, a first timer's mistake, but understandable. I should have selected just a couple of the databases, not all of them. I click on the Next button, and I'm faced with what looks like a text entry field. I actually had to read the instructions on the window to figure out what to do here: enter the Universal Product Code (UPC) on the back of almost every paperback book I own, or find and enter the ISBN. Another digression: When entering the UPC, be sure you have it all, and all of the numbers are correct. A UPC is 12 or 13 numbers, and when you look at the bar code, the first and last number are to the left and right of the bar code, not under it as the other numbers are. If you don't get them all, or if any of them are incorrect - Beeeep! The program will let you know.

Hit enter. Enter the next UPC, and the next and the next and the next, until I'm done with the thirty or so books in this lot. (It seems I'm still typing, but bear with me; it will get easier.) Whew! I'm done with this lot. Now to hit the Next button and see what happens. Readerware takes those UPCs I entered, and proceeds to go out to each of the databases I selected, and downloads the pertinent information about each book I've entered. Still, this is pretty neat. This program is getting a lot of information about each book, and indeed, more than I really need. But still - that's a lot of typing I didn't do. The bad thing is that even with broadband, checking all those databases takes a lot of time per UPC. As I said, a beginner's error.

Of course, I can make it even easier. When I bought the program, the publisher was offering USB or PS2 bus hand-held bar code scanners. OK - now, I just wave the scanner over the bar code which gets entered into the UPC entry field, and I move on to the next book. And over and over and over again. No typing, right? Well, not quite. More about that in a moment. Still, I can do twenty or thirty books in just a few minutes, say about ten percent of the time it took me to find and enter the ISBN or UPC, and about one percent of the time it would take me to enter all of the data

While I'm still getting all of my books and CDs cataloged, I completed my DVDs very quickly. It took about seven or eight hours total time to get all of my extensive collection of DVDs into the database, including cover images (where the vendors had them available), running times, and all that other information I either don't want to know or don't care about. Note that the information came from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other commercial sources; it appears that there isn't a central clearing house for this information as there is for books (the Library of Congress).

Now, for some of the down sides of this program. The interface is somewhat clunky; the program is written in Java, so while it looks pretty much the same on a Windows box as on a Mac, it doesn't quite act the way you'd think. Some commonly used key combos don't work when and where you'd expect; the icons, while they have pretty good descriptor tags, are pretty crude; and while you can modify the output a little, I'm still working on getting it to look exactly the way I want. There are extensive help pages, though finding exactly what you want can be somewhat frustrating: The help pages tell you that you can do something, but finding the instructions can be quite difficult.

I said earlier that no typing was required if you use the bar code scanner. Well, take a look at all of your books, DVDs, and CDs. Unfortunately, not all of them will have the UPC bar code, so you'll have to enter the UPC or ISBN manually. Well, again, almost. Not all books, DVDs, and CDs have a UPC or ISBN. Publisher's didn't start putting that information in the books until the late 1960s, and bar codes didn't come out until some time later. And of course, many hard back books still don't have the bar codes on them, except for those easily-torn dust jackets. Sometimes, the book, CD, or DVD from which you got the UPC doesn't quite match the info in the databases you are using. Sometimes the data comes out in a form you don't want, for example, the author's name is all in capital letters, or there is extra information in the title. One problem I've had is with titles that begin with articles, say "The Guns of Navaronne" or "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". Well, when I try to put the titles in alphabetical order, these are now out of place. Instead of "Guns", my catalog uses "The", and likewise for "Tree" and "A". This problem is the same in DVDs as for CDs, and indeed is worse for CDs. Many groups have "The", "A", or "An" in front of their names, such as "The Fureys", or "A Flock of Seagulls". These have to be manually changed to keep your alphabetical order straight.

There are a lot of features available in these three programs. If you have the time and interest or need, I would recommend downloading one or more of these products, and trying it out. For those of us with extensive libraries of books, music, or films, we need a product like this. Try it, and you may like it.

Addendum: I put the trial version of Readerware on my Mom's iBook. The next day, she wrote and told me that the program was very easy to use; she really likes it. She also said that it was easy enough to use that anyone should be able to use it to great inventory benefit. It does take playing with the program for it to become familiar and comfortable.

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Date Revised: 21 February 2004