Best ebook library management tool?

April 2, 2008 2:37 AM

What is the best ebook library management software you mefites can recommend? I've googled about a bit and found some things that didn't look too promising or were not available on either of my platforms of choice. What I'd like is a total library management solution, similar to what iTunes or Amarok does for music. I have a Linux workstation as well as a Mac, so I would like suggestions for non-Windows tools only, unless the tool is so superior that it's worth the hassle getting it working with Wine or somesuch.
posted by thedaniel to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Equating ebooks with pdf files:
Papers= iTunes for .pdf files (on the mac). Yeah it's built more for scientific/academic papers but it should do the trick.
Yep = iPhoto for .pdf files. Also for mac.
Together = file manager on crack -- when your ebooks are different formats.

Ebook sounds kinda vague because there's no specific format for it but a search for ebook on iusethis turned up libprs500, but I can't vouch for it. It's "meant to be a complete e-library solution and thus includes, library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion as well as device sync features."
posted by drea at 6:38 AM on April 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

thedaniel, I've been meaning to ask this question for quite some time. I haven't found anything suitable for my needs yet. Ideally for me, this would mean looking books up based upon filename in the ISFDB, and then tagging them somehow. It's on my list of programming projects, but the list goes ever on and on.
posted by adamwolf at 7:13 AM on April 2, 2008

I absolutely love the look of Papers, but I don't like the article/journal focus of the program. It makes it difficult and annoying to use it with other eBooks. I have a huge collection of programming and RPG books in PDF that I'd love to keep in Papers, but the program's laser-like focus on it's specialty makes it a pain to repurpose.

I'd like to point out that I have no problem with the design decisions the Papers team took, it just sucks for me :)
posted by Ikazuchi at 8:15 AM on April 2, 2008

You could manage PDFs in iTunes.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:52 AM on April 2, 2008

Zotero could work. Depending upon what you need to track, just keeping it all in a spreadsheet (maybe with one field being a path to the file) might suffice.

Windows-only (but for others who might find the thread): Access 2007 lets you attach files to records. So a simple database could store metadata and the PDFs themselves. There surely are some other desktop database solutions that have this functionality. I do a lot of work with Access, which is why it comes to mind.
posted by wheat at 10:40 AM on April 2, 2008

JabRef is an open source Java GUI frontend for managing bibliographies. I use it to organise my ebooks.
posted by Pigpen at 8:02 PM on April 2, 2008