Bookpiles book organizer

This blog is about my open source program Bookpiles and other book and software related themes.

I hope to put 2 or 3 entries together each month.

Bookpiles is an open source book organizer http://www.bookpiles.org hosted at Sourceforge.

Development has started nearly 2 years ago; the first public release was 1 year ago. Since then 6 versions have been released. Current version is 1.15.

I have started this project, because I have lots of books and lots of book data from various sources.

I borrow books from different public libraries. The libraries have web sites and each library user borrowing books has automatically an own account. My account shows me the books I have currently borrowed and my book reservations.

But for whatever reason they never show books I have returned.

I buy some books from Amazon.
My Amazon account shows all books I ever bought from them – 2 accounts in fact: Amazon.de and Amazon.com.

But I can’t add personal data to it, e.g. if and when I have read this book.

I participate in Bookcrossing. http://www.bookcrossing.com.
Basically you give (some of) your books away to other people and receive books from other people. There are different exchange schemas, but that’s the basic idea.
Some books I receive from other Bookcrossers and some of my books I give to them. For each book exists a log with an entry from each person who had this book. Each log entry shows what someone has dome with this book. Sometimes long descriptions, more often some short statements.
I can add personal information about each book.

But I don’t have all of my books registered at Bookcrossing.

For nearly all newer books there is some bibliographic data on the web.
And for a large portion of my books there is some personal information on the web, at least temporarily.

But this information is spread across different web sites. The web sites have different purposes and store therefore different data. Amazon is about buying books, Bookcrossing about giving books away and public libraries about lending books.

• I want to collect data about books from various sources

• I want to type in as little as possible

• I want to add personal information like comments, data read, received from

• And I want to keep the data on my PC.

• Bookpiles is a kind of organizer, a book organizer
  

These were the basic ideas when I started the Bookpiles project.