Welcome to BookDB!


Introduction

BookDB will help you catalogue a book collection


Why is this program free?


This program is updated often. Visit the home page at Spacejock Software often to check for newer versions.

BookDB is copyright Spacejock Software. You may distribute BookDB to whoever you like providing you don't modify the program or associated documentation. You can charge a small fee to cover the cost of distribution, but you may not sell the program itself.

 


Important Notice

I have done my best to make BookDB as free of errors as possible, but I cannot guarantee it is completely bug-free. I cannot be held liable for any damage you or your computer may suffer after installing or using this program. If you don't accept that, please uninstall it.



What is it?
BookDB is a simple yet powerful database tool which will help you keep track of your book collection. You can create and edit publishers, authors and categories then add books using a simple entry screen. The latest version also allows you to import your books from a text file, in case you've already got them in another program.

Why would I use it?
If you're like me, you've got a lot of books. When I find an author I like, I buy everything they've written. Sometimes it's hard to remember which ones I've bought and which ones I'm still looking for, and that's where this program comes in. I enter all my books into BookDB as I buy them, and then take a micro-printed list with me when I'm out and about. (You may need a magnifying glass - the print is tiny!) If I see a book by an author I'm collecting, I pull out the list and make sure I don't already have it. Easy.

Before you get to the rest of the manual, let me explain about the inbuilt auto-updater. By default, this feature is switched off, but if you'd like to know when a new release of this program is available you should manually 'Check for Update' and then ensure that 'Disable automatic checking' is un-ticked. See the image below for a reference:



If this option is unticked, the program will perform a check for a new update once a week. Assuming you run the program, that is. This feature is not something which runs in the background all the time.

How do I use it?
Installation is just a case of double-clicking SETUP.EXE in the ZIP file you downloaded. The setup program will suggest a default location for itself (c:\program files\BookDB) and then proceed to install all the bits and pieces.

After installation you will have a new entry in your start menu. Just click on BookDB and the main menu will appear.

From now on, I'm going to assume you installed the program and have got the main menu in front of you. Grab a book and I'll walk you through it.

The first thing you should do is click on the Add Book button in the lower right corner of the screen. You will be presented with the Book details page. Enter the title, then click on the drop-down list of Authors - notice there aren't any (yet). Click on Add New and enter the Author's Surname and First Name, then click Save. Now the author is available from the drop-down list, and you'll never have to add them again. Next, click on the Publisher list, and the Publisher of your book by clicking Add New.

After you've selected the Author and Publisher, you can fill out any other fields (e.g. ISBN, year of publication.) Finally you get to pick a category. No categories in the list? Just click Add New and enter one which is suitable for this book.

You can also enter the amount paid for the book (or the amount you want to sell it for, if you trade the things)

Now you can click Save, and the form will disappear while the book is stored in the database. It doesn't take long, and as quick as a flash the form is back again. Some of the fields are blank (like the title) but the Author, Publisher, etc persist. This is great when you are adding several books by the same author.

After you've added half a dozen books, you can click Abort and you'll see the titles listed on the main menu. Note that you can click on the four 'List' buttons to view Books, Authors, Publishers and Categories in the main window. You can also change the Books list to show only a certain category, by clicking the down-arrow next to 'All'. Once you have a lot of books in the list, the 'Filter' box comes into its own - just enter a word like 'Blyton' and click 'Book List' and only books with 'Blyton' in the title or author will show up. Clear the box and click 'Book List' again to get the full list back.

Right-clicking on the book list will allow you to select the sorting method (Author or Title).

You can edit a book, author, publisher or category by double-clicking it in the main window, making your changes and clicking OK.

You can delete a book by clicking its title once and pressing DEL (on the keyboard). You can delete publishers, authors and categories in the same way, but please be aware that deleting an author will delete all the books in your database by that author. If you delete a publisher, all the books in your database by that publisher will be deleted, and the same goes for categories. You will get a warning message when your try and delete authors, publishers or categories - please heed it!

Importing Books
The good news is that it could save you a lot of typing. The bad news is that the program expects a certain format. There must be a header row, and any data fields with commas in MUST be enclosed in double quotes.

Your import file can contain one or more fields, in any order, as long as the header for each column of data matches one of the following:

Title
Surname
FirstNames
2ndSurname
2ndFirstNames
Publisher
Cat0 - Cat10
ISBN
Description
Published
Date Added
Format
Fiction
Cost
Readinglevel
OriginalTitle
Language
CallNum
Edition
Pages

What this means is that you can create a simple import file with no more than title and surname, if you wish:

title, surname
"Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch", "Simon Haynes"

Any fields containing a comma must be enclosed in quotes. Exporting from most spreadsheets will do this automatically.

(The easiest way to get the format is to add one book to the program manually, then export the list to text. Now open that file and it'll contain exactly what you need. In fact, if you rename the export file to (filename).CSV you can then open it in your spreadsheet software and start adding new books to it. When done, you can import this file. With this new version of BookDB you can remove the columns you don't want, too.)

Hints: Make sure you don't have any double quotes inside a text field.

When you save to CSV from your spreadsheet software it'll automatically include the double quotes for fields that need them. If you re-open the CSV it'll hide the quotes from you, but if you open it with a text editor (e.g. Wordpad) you'll see them. To test this, just change the file extension on your file to .txt and double-click to view. Remember to change it back to csv afterwards though.

You can then import the file, and the program will add the book, the author, the category and the publisher.

You can also import your catalogue from LibraryThing, which gives you a local, searchable database of your books. Whilst logged in to your LT account, click Tools and then "Export all records as tab-delimited text". Save the XLS file to your computer and then use BookDB's 'Import LibraryThing' to read all the data in.

Importing Copies

You can't book anything out unless the book record has one or more copies attached to it. If you have a lot of copies to add, this is the best way to do it:

First, make sure you've set up all your book records.
Export all your book records to Booklist.txt
Next, open any book record and add one copy.
Now select "export copies" from the main menu.
Locate the file Copies.txt and open it in Excel, OpenOffice Calc or the spreadsheet app of your choice.
Do the same with booklist.txt.
Delete ALL columns from booklist.txt except the BOOKID one.
Now create columns to match the headers in Copies.txt, in the same order.
Now you need to fill the data in. You can get away with just BookID (already filled) and your existing barcode for each copy.
If you have more than one copy of a particular book, just duplicate the line with the BookID in it, and enter the barcode for the second and subsequent copies.

When the file is complete, save to CSV and import it using 'Import Copies'. This will attach all the copies in your file to their book records, and give them the allocated barcodes at the same time.

If you mess up, exit BookDB and delete the file Copies.dat from the program folder. When you re-run bookdb, all the copies will be gone and you can go through the import again.

Exporting
The 'export' button will export everything in the main list to a comma delimited file in the program directory. If you want to export all your books, make sure you don't have an active filter or the export will only save out those books covered by the filter.

Printing
Finally, the PRINT menu produces a multi-column small-print listing of your books. As mentioned earlier, this is really useful for collectors.

To back up your database
Click Utilities - Backup Data and specify the destination. (I recommend a floppy disk or memory stick.)

To restore your database
First install BookDB2 and locate the folder containing the BookDB2.exe file (Usually C:\Program Files\BookDB2)

Then, copy the backed-up data into that folder. If the backup is a zip file, double-click the zip to open it first, and then extract the contents

If there are data files in the BookDB2 folder already you may have run the program after install. If the files are all zero-size (0 bytes) then they can be overwritten with your backup files. If not, back them up before you restore over the top of them.

Export to HTML
When you run this report for the first time BookDB will create three template files: header, body and footer. These will be saved in the Templates folder in your BookDB path (usually C:\Program Files\BookDB\ or C:\Programs\BookDB\). You can modify the files if you have any HTML coding experience, and wherever you use one of the recognised keywords (listed above in the import section) surrounded by @@ (e.g. @@Title@@) the program will replace your keyword with data when exporting.

Here's a sample HTMLBookTemplateV1.txt file which will show your books in a list, one line per book:


Just edit the existing HTMLBookTemplateV1.txt, paste the above into it and when you run the Export to HTML report you'll get a listing instead of a box per book. You can use any of the Import fields listed further up this help file, as long as you wrap them in @@ and @@.

If you don't understand a word of that, don't worry about it. It's an advanced feature. By the way, if you mess up the template files just delete them and BookDB will create a default set for you.

School/Library Environments
There are a couple of handy tweaks for the BookDB2.ini file (This file is created when you first run BookDB. Don't edit it unless you've closed the program first.):
1) If you add Datapath, (path to shared database) BookDB will read from the specified folder
e.g. Datapath,\\NetworkServer\BookDB

2) If you install BookDB on the terminals each can have their own ini file with the database path as above, but adding
ViewOnly,True

to the ini file will activate 'view' mode where nothing can be edited, changed or printed. Ideal for students/patrons to use as a dumb terminal. Obviously you should make sure they can't access the folder containing BookDB or they could just edit this setting back again. Set it to readonly and admin write permissions and all should be well. (The BookDB database path can then be read only, since the program won't try to save anything.) If you have any questions or issues with this feature please contact me via http://www.spacejock.com/

I hope you enjoy this program - I wrote it for my own use like everything at Spacejock Software. Remember, program updates are always available at:

http://www.spacejock.com









BookDB Home Page