Track Your Reading and Catalogue Books with BookTomb [Win]

I have loved to read since I was about 8 years old. I remember starting to read novels around 12. My first novel was a hardcover huge book by Stephen King called The Stand.

Since reading that, I have been addicted to reading and have amassed a huge collection of literary titles and some crap, unfortunately. I have so many books, I never know what I kept and what I tossed.

So when someone asks me if they may borrow the book I was talking about last week, my answer would be, “Yeah, if you can come and find it!”

Now, I stumbled upon this small portable application called BookTomb and it not only stores all your book loving data – it also has the ability to retrieve book covers, ISBN numbers, descriptions and a bunch more from Amazon, ISBNdb and BookThing. So entering your collection into should be a snap! Let’s see how easy it is to use BookTomb.

The portable application is 2.7MB and consists of the executable and a database file. You can put them on a thumb drive or virtually anywhere. Upon launching the program, I had to modify one setting in the tools/preferences menu to allow Amazon to communicate with my database. I will show you that as I go along.

On first launch you will see this:

Next thing you should do if you want the Amazon search to work, go to Tools. Then you will see this screen:

I changed the Amazon Access Method to “via bookTome” and I choose Amazon at the bottom for “Default description service provider”. Now you are ready to enter some books!

Click on Authors or any other link on the left so that you can see the Add New Book menu option again – then hit it.

I just filled in the Title and Author. I choose Stephen King’s The Cell that I read a while back. Then, I hit the Import from Amazon button at the bottom and it brought me to this page:

I selected my book, which was the second choice and I checked the boxes next to all of the fields. If you don’t want all the information simply leave the box next to that field unchecked. Then hit the Import book button on the bottom right.

Now all the fields you chose will show up when you highlight or open your book. You can hit View all books to see everything you have added to your database. Some of the other features I like about this program include the ability to mark a book as read, search by author or title, add books to your wish list and even track your reading.

The program keeps a history of everything you modify in a book from when you added it. So if you added a book as soon as you bought it and a week later you mark it as read, all of that is recorded. You can see this by selecting a book and then choosing history like so:

This is an awesome portable application for any book aficionado! Do you have another way to catalogue your book collection?

Have you searched our directory? We have a lot of interesting posts regarding books and reading. If you can’t decide on which book to read next, let Stefan help you out by showing you the 8 best book review sites.