lilfluff

I have been off and on grabbing a stack of manga (and a few assorted trade paperback editions of other stuff) and entering them into a linux app called Alexandria. It's not perfect (in fact the current version seems to have a few stability issues -- however it only ever takes itself down, and seems to do so without taking out any records), but it has some nice features.

* I can do ISBN lookups, and if it finds the book it will enter in the details for me
* Including automatically snagging cover photos
* I can export the records in a variety of formats including on huge web page or a csv file.
* It will spot attempts to enter duplicate records
* Like most other such apps it has a book loan feature that will let you see when and to who you loaned a book
* You can give books an 0-5 star rating
* You can also record random notes for any particular book
* In theory I can enter a books information manually in a form, but that's one of the unstable parts right now
** However, the record for each book is stored as a YAML formatted text file. Which means that when I discovered that Runaways volume two in paperback does not exist according to the automated Amazon lookup, I was able to take care of the issue with a text editor, a single cut&paste from an existing file, and a few quick edits.

Here for example is what I saved to create the entry:

--- !ruby/object:Alexandria::Book
authors:
- Brian K Vaughan
- Adrian Alphona
- Jo Chen
edition: Paperback
isbn: 0785114157
notes: ""
publisher: Marvel Comics
saved_ident: 0785114157
title: "Runaways Vol. 2: Teenage Wasteland"

Yeah, the penciler and inker get recorded as authors. The program's original intent was for recording regular books not comic books (of whatever genre, style, or national origin).

The records being formatted plain text means a low barrier to playing around with the database. It also means that if I decide to switch to another program it shouldn't be too difficult to transfer the existing records. One of the other major linux book collection programs looks to be Tellico, which will happily slurp up Alexandria records. Or I could decide to roll my own php/mysql web app and without too much trouble pull over the records (including cover images).

But in the end just getting a decent list of what I have will be enough of an improvement. It's rather annoying to go into the bookstore and stare at the shelf thinking to myself, "Okay... Just what volume of Bleach did I leave off on anyway..."

After removing the crowded hard drive on my laptop and putting in a nice roomy one, I set the laptop up to dual boot Windows and Linux. I was running Linux on one of my desktop machines before the motherboard on it died without warning. I liked it then, but I'm liking this new distribution even better. It helps that I'd already changed over to FireFox as my default browser, so all I had to do was copy over and import my bookmarks for that. But I can really see myself spending much of my time booted into Linux. The only thing I *have* to switch over to Windows for currently is viewing DVDs.

I'll have to take another look in a week and a month and see how I feel then, but I'm feeling good about having installed it now. It's got this over a year old $500 special laptop running pretty smoothly.