I have just finished writing a book, a rather large work of non-fiction that is due to go to the press very shortly. One of my last tasks remaining is to compile the bibliography. Unfortunately, the file that I kept with my reference sources includes about 100 books for which I recorded just the title and the author. The editor has asked me to also include the book’s publisher and the year of publication.
I own most of these books and could re-catalog them, but that’s a labor intensive task. Are there any book cataloging tools that could take my list of titles and authors and retrieve that information for me automatically? I’m aware of tools like Readerware and LibraryThing.com, but a far as I know those will only retrieve information based on ISBN’s, and I don’t have that data in my spreadsheet.
Well, it looks like you’re doing it manually.
I suggest taking your books, going into Amazon, and searching for them until you find an equivalent copy and edition. That’ll give you the ISBN.
Armed with the ISBN, you can either search library databases or rely on Amazon to give you the rest of the information.
Note that user-created pages for titles available on Amazon are sometimes inaccurate.
Book Collector, from Collectorz.com can do an internet search on book titles or the name of the author. You can download a demo of it that has the features but only allows 50 titles to be added and see if it does what you want.
Librarything.com (Disclaimer: I’m a very, very happy lifetime subscriber) absolutely allows you to search by name, by author, ISBN, LC# and a host of other options. It is free to use up to 200 books, it is easy to download your library and convert it to pretty much whatever. I would gather just having the name, you could have any information you wanted from a book in less than 30 seconds a book.
I’ve entered in over 750 books so far and it is amazing the info that can be in the database, book dimension, pages, image information, book weight, etc.
Did I mention it is free up to 200 books? (and even if you had more, you could create multiple accounts)
I’ll second Auntbeast’s enthusiastic reccomendation for LibraryThing.com – I’m also a lifetime subscriber. If books are a part of you life, this site will change your world.
However, while I realize I can do lookups based on title & author when I’m manually adding a book, I’d still have to do them one at a time. Their universal import tool only works with ISBNs. My list actually has 188 books, and I’d rather not have to enter them one at a time. If I’m overlooking something, Auntbeast, please let me know.
Also, thanks, Lok. The tool works exactly as you said. If I can’t find a solution with LibraryThing I’ll pony up the registration fee.