Yesterday afternoon my wife told me that she would like to make a list of all books that we own. So I started looking for a piece of software that can help to do this task and in the german unix apps newsgroup I got a pointer to Tellico which looks perfect for the job.

The big advantage of Tellico is that you can insert catalog entries by just typing in the ISBN number of your book and look for it on the Internet. Tellico can then retrieve all the data from Amazon or other data sources and you can even get a small icon of the book cover.

So now within a few minutes you can enter a bookshelf contens into the computer. At the moment I entered half of an Ikea Billy shelf, that is in numbers 79 books and the time for it was less than one hour, including taking every book out, putting it on my desk, enter the ISBN and so on.

So there will be still some hours of work until all our books are in the catalog, but yes, I like this tool very much since it helps me to keep an overview of what books I have.

Interesting was also to look at the collection with different views. There is one view which sorts the year when the book was published and moment my „oldest“ computer book is from 1993. Its ‚“Managing projects with make“ and even if its still 14 years old it is still of use. On the other hand I recently dumped a lot of old „Windows 95“ and „Windows 98“ books since they are so much outdated that they are of no use any more.