Mood: a-ok
Topic: Homeschool Product Review
Oh, all right, if you know me this really isn't a secret. If you really know me and been to my home you know my hobby. Collecting books. I love books. I may not fully read them all, but I love them. The whole family loves them. We have fiction and non-fiction. We have children's and adult. We have long books and short books. We have old books and new books. We have everything. It didn't help that I inherited my grandfather's library and then, later, my dad's library.
Books are a good thing. My kids have learned to love reading because of Sarah's and my love of books. The only problem is that they are all over the place and not in any particular order. We don't know what we have and what we don't have. In fact, the other day, I found five copies of the same book! So, how do I make things better? How do I organize our books so that we can find what we need? How do I know what we really have?
Enter Collectorz! Collectorz is an awesome downloadable program that allows you to enter books into a database so that you know what you have. Not only that, you can then organize the books any way that you want them. Do you want to organize them into alphabetical order? No problem! Do you want them to be sorted by topic? You've got it! Do you like the way the library organizes things? You can organize your books that way as well!
And, Oh the things you can discover about your collection! So far I have made two databases for our books (you can do that you know). One for our homeschool books and one for all of the other books we have. I know that some of them overlap and I may someday combine the two but that's what I started out with. Anyway, of the 188 non-homeschool books that I have entered into the system so far, did you know that we have 36 Christian Fiction novels, 23 Love Stories (yuck, those are my wife's), and 16 Historical Fiction (yep, those are mine)? We even have one that is categorized as a "Buildungromans" book. Does anyone know what that is?
And, those 188 books have a total of 47178 pages for an average of about 260 pages each. But, here's the really interesting fact. The cover price of all of those entered books is only $1688.94! That means that the average cover price was $12.89.
Are all of these statistics boring you? Don't think these facts are handy? Well, do you loan out your books? You can keep track of who you loaned to and what book you loaned to them.
Perhaps you are one who likes statistics. Maybe you want to know when a particular book was published. Who illustrated the cover of that book? What language was that book originally written in? Collectorz has it all in their database!
Okay, I know what you must be thinking. It must have taken me hours to input all of that information. Well, that's where you are wrong! All you have to do is enter the book's ISBN number and all of this information shows up! Still think entering all of the information is too much? Well, you can do like I did. I bought a small scanner for less than $20 on Amazon and scanned in the bar codes. That's right! You can do that too.
The type of scanner that I bought was great, but that's not what I'm reviewing right now. I'll save it for another post, but it was a lot of fun. I just brought a stack of books to where I was watching TV and scanned them as I was watching. Then I took them back to the bookshelf during a commercial break and grabbed some more to scan. Oh the sacrifices I make. I really worked up a sweat getting up off of my duff every fifteen minutes and walking down the hall...not to mention my sore arm from picking up the scanner to scan! If you want a ton of work to do, don't buy this system! There were a few books that were published before the days of scanners, and I had to enter them in by hand, and a few books were even written before ISBN codes and I had to enter the author and title. Even then, all of the information automatically came right up. It was all so easy.
Now you must be thinking that a system like this must cost 100s of dollars. Nope! You can download the standard edition for $29.95 or the pro for just $49.95. What's the difference? Well, there are quite a few, but both do most of the things that I mentioned above. I will tell you that the pro edition allows you to transfer all of your Collectorz files to your iphone! Yep...now, if you are at the store and can't remember if you own a particular book or not, you can just look on your phone. I really love Collectorz! I plan on putting all of our books in Dewey decimal order so that I can find things by topic. Still not convinced? You can try it for free (100 book max.). Just click here or on any one of the hi-lighted links above.
One final word. Are books not your thing? What about DVD's or CD's? Your old record collection? MP3's? Comic books? Photographs? Collectorz has programs for those as well. Just click on one of the links above to check them out. As usual, since this is a TOS Homeschool Crew item, many more crew members reviewed this and you can find their reviews by clicking here. Happy Home Educating!
As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew I was given a free download of Collectorz "Book Collector" program to try out and review on my blog.
Updated: Saturday, 6 November 2010 12:17 AM CDT
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