Book Collection Managment for Linux
Once upon a time, the options available to Linux users interested in managing their book collections were limited. The situation was so bleak that I attempted to create my own web-based application. That app was fine until I tried to host it on my 64MB VPS and failed (RoR had a footprint of 60MB all by itself)!
Lately, I have been missing the ability to browse through my books. I started thinking about having another attempt at a book collection manger. Maybe this time I would try and write a desktop application. I could use python or even try out mono. So today I did a bit of googling and stumbled upon Alexandria, a book collection manager for GNOME.
This application is brilliant! It is almost the perfect application. All I needed to do was get a list of books in my old app:
echo "select isbn from books;" | sqlite3 mybooklist_production.sqlite > import-list.txt |
I was then able to import all my old books into Alexandria using the import ISBN list feature. I would like to recommend this app to anyone who is looking for a book collection manger for Linux. The site also has deb packages for those who use Debian or Ubuntu.
October 9th, 2009 at 6:49 am
I’ll have to dig through my backups… I wrote a book manager years ago. If I recall correctly, I wrote it in PHP with PHP-Mason (my HTML::Mason clone for PHP). I just came across it looking through some old backups, I’ll figure out which backup it was and I’ll put it back online.
October 9th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Found it! 😉 It is using PHP to generate XML files and being templated via XSLT to generate XHTML 1.1 Strict… I wrote it back in 2004. The SQL schema is lost, but there were only two tables…
ftp://ftp.grokthis.net/pub/users/ewindisch/software/books-0.0.1.tgz