Comic nerd's dream/nightmare come true!

May 2, 2007 3:40 PM

I get to take an inventory of my work's comic library. Fun, yes - but also... Yikes. There has to be a better way to track our comics than this clunky excel spreadsheet. And I'm no wiz at filemaker. Is there a free/cheap software that can help?

I'm on a Mac. Need to keep track of different titles (i.e. Small variations in title - "Superfantasticman" or "Superfantasticman vs Ultradude!" or "Superfantasticman: The RETURN!" Need to keep track of issue #. Need to keep track of quantity in stock. Importantly, need to differentiate between hardcover/softcover trade paper backs and single issue copies. When I'm done, this would be put on our company server and I would use it to see when we need to order more of certain titles - if there was a way to tag "copies less than 5" that would be great.

Am I dreaming?

posted by fillsthepews to Technology (15 answers total)

I wonder if Delicious Library could also do comics as well. They should. It's an excellent program. Even has lending tracking, ratings, and notes.
posted by iamkimiam at 3:51 PM on May 2, 2007

OpenOffice's database program should work, shouldn't it? Set up your database, put in the info, write the queries to return results you need. Or am I missing something completely?
posted by dilettante at 3:54 PM on May 2, 2007

Response by poster: Perhaps I'm database impared. I'll use anything that works, I guess it just needs to be fairly easy to set up. Thanks! I'll check it out.
posted by fillsthepews at 3:57 PM on May 2, 2007

One thing that it seems might help you would be a barcode reader. There are some simple ones that can be used to do lookups in public databases like Amazon.com to parse information. That would at least make the gathering and entry into text format faster. Then at least you'd be reduced to copy-paste, not so much typing.
posted by autojack at 4:07 PM on May 2, 2007

If your comics have barcode numbers, definitely look into Delicious Library mentioned above.

Here are a few others I found searching google for "Macintosh comic book inventory software":

http://www.deepprose.com/ Booxter
http://www.wickedlysimple.com/BookTracker/ BookTracker
http://books.aetherial.net/wordpress/ Books For Mac OS X
http://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/ Bookpedia

Bookpedia looks very promising, providing the same iSight scanning feature as Delicious Library. $18.
posted by smallerdemon at 4:10 PM on May 2, 2007

dabble db is a hosted database service. Not exactly what you're talking about, but you can design a relational database on the fly (import old excel spreadsheets, the whole shebang). It's web-based and very slick.
posted by adamrice at 4:26 PM on May 2, 2007

Delicious Library utilizes an iSight (or any other) camera as a barcode reader. It works very well.
posted by iamkimiam at 4:53 PM on May 2, 2007

Would a CueCat help? You can mod it to use with Delicious Library.
posted by hindmost at 5:58 PM on May 2, 2007

This website has a trial edition that you could try out with 100 comics. The price for the full deal isn't too bad either.
posted by ikahime at 6:46 PM on May 2, 2007

This program is now free for up to 500 comics, and is updated weekly.
posted by WolfDaddy at 7:36 PM on May 2, 2007 [1 favorite]

As I understand it, comic barcodes don't contain ISBN numbers - so Delicious Library won't help. Periodicals use a different database.

What you need is the IntelliScanner Comic Collector bundle. It was supposed to ship in April, but the site doesn't seem to be offering it yet. Presumably, you can use any scanner with their software, so you may not have to pay for the scanner they're selling.

Along those lines: I didn't have any difficulty modifying the CueCat hindmost mentions. It's not as accurate as a commercial scanner, but the price is definitely right.

Good luck with your pleasant task!
posted by aladfar at 7:43 PM on May 2, 2007

Perhaps Comic Book Addict would be up your alley?

DISCLAIMER: I'm friends with the founder.
posted by mjbraun at 7:17 AM on May 3, 2007

Do you blog? Any online blogging service which allows tags could do this, pretty simply. Start a new blog, and enter each book as a "post," with the title as the post "title." You can then enter the other information (like writer, artist, or no. of copies) in the body of the post, or use the tag fields.

Blogs come ready-equipped with search features (for updating entries and creating a "catalog"), tagging will allow you display all books with the same "subjects" (like hardcover/trade paper), and you get other groovy stuff like RSS feeds, or displaying images. And you can update it from anywhere, online.
posted by steef at 8:12 AM on May 3, 2007

This is a problem that cries out for a database answer. Unfortunately, Office for OSX doesnt come with access, which is very easy to use. Someone mentioned open office above and you might have a lot of luck with the current version of Base. Maybe google around for a some howto's and see if youre comfortable with it.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:08 AM on May 3, 2007

Unless you absolutely must have the database run locally on your computer, why not use ComicBook DB? You wouldn't be able to upload the spreadsheet, but the interface is pretty intuitive, you wouldn't have to catalog each comic, and it runs reports as well as exports a CSV for backups.
posted by lilnemo at 4:24 PM on May 19, 2007