Booxter

Matthew Shedlick, CEO of Deep Prose came to the Apple SoHo store to talk about the application he developed called Booxter, which can be used to track information about books in the form of libraries.

Booxter takes barcodes for books and inputs them into a library, which is essentially a database, via different methods: manual input, dragging and dropping icons/links from various websites (Amazon, Barnes & Noble etc) that provide information about books, scanning barcodes of books with the use of bar code scanners, iSights and other cameras that can view bar codes clearly. Booxter searches the web for the ISBN or LCNN numbers that are on the bar codes of books to obtain information like Title, cover, publisher, author etc. related to the book to include in the database of Booxter. The information of books contained within Booxter can be exported in HTML/XML format, BibTex (which is a bibliographical format), and as a text file. A user can customize what fields of information to display for each book and even set up when a user borrowed a book and when a book is due, enabling the establishment of a lending library. Booxter can export the book information from Booxter to an iPod, so a user could access their book information via the notes function of the iPod.

Matthew highlighted the features of Booxter that work directly with Tiger such as the ability to use spotlight to index the information of the books contained in the different libraries within Booxter. Spotlight in the toolbar can be used to access information about books in Booxter by launching Booxter files directly even if the application is not currently running. The interface for organizing books into various libraries is similar to the iTunes smart playlist function, where a user can implement specific conditions to organize a series of books.

This is useful software if you have an interest in creating a database of books you own or books you want to own.


Link to download the software: Deep Prose