BookCrawler

by Alex

I’m a professor. I have a lot of books. After testing several bibliography apps I chose BookCrawler to catalog my home library (mostly so I could alphabetize it) with my iPod touch. The program is great — using Pic2Shop as a barcode scanner it easily sucked down info about my books. In one case when I did inexplicably manage to break the app, the developer responded to my email request for help literally within minutes. I’d really consider this a one-stop shop solution for book cataloguing for most amateur bibliophiles.

For professional and expert users, however, there are some things that could be improved. First, afaik Google Book’s metadata is a total mess. Doesn’t it WorldCat have an api? Since my main goal was to alphabetize my books and keep track of them, super-detailed metadata was not that important, but I have a feeling that this app could easily be improved if the developers found cleaner catalogs to consult. Or maybe its not.

Secondly, and more importantly, is exporting your data. The app features a super-convenient option to export your data in SQL or CSV formats, but few of these formats are supported by standard bibliography software. As a result, getting your data out of the app and into Sente, Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, BibDesk, or even EndNote can be a pain. Even more important than getting clean metadata, then, is producing an ability to export records in bibtex format, which iirc is more or less the defacto standard these days.

Overall, this is a great app by a great developer that is undoubtedly one of the best (if not the best) of its kind. I very highly recommend it — and with just a few more tweaks it will have all of the ridiculously specialized features that niche users like me clamor for!