This application provides an easy way to collect, organize and maintain information about one’s book collection.

Pros: Book Tracker - Collector’s Edition software helps organize and catalog one’s book collection. 19 odd fields that can hold information about a book include title, author, category, value, printing date, publishing date, purchase price, date purchased, Edition, rating, condition, location, publisher, ISBN, and a graphic field. Some more fields exist that can be defined by the user.

All these directly help with the search. Finding a book becomes that much easier when more than one such field can be defined to parameterize a search. Search is made easier by categorizing books by its genre. These are on tabs in the user interaction panel and are of the following categories fiction, history, mystery, non-fiction, poetry and science fiction.

One can add notes about a book. This is a free form text block that can be added to a book. The library functions lets one keep track of books lent out to friends and relatives. Quite often this is one aspect of keeping a book collection which can cause regret as books have a tendency to get lost unless one can keep track of who borrowed what. Report generation is another nice part of the application. Besides standard reports one can customize reports, get search reports and so on.

Cons: The data base collects cover images and ISBN numbers as part of the book record. A scanning interface that can collect both these pieces of information by scanning the book covers would have been very useful.

The available categories do not define all categories of books hence provision for user defined categories would have been very useful. Just a non-fiction category is too broad.

Overall quite a useful package, rates 4 stars.