Books can be your friend, counselor and a teacher, as quoted by Elliot. Friends can share a quiet time reading books but they can spend more time by discussing and gossiping about it. I love purchasing books both for my professional needs and also for casual reading. I can speak hours together with my friends over my favorite books. I was really excited to know about Book collector connect, a web application to catalog books. The application not only allows you to catalog your own collection of books but also to share your catalog with your friends in facebook and twitter. I found cataloging very easy in this application. The best part about the application is that the collection can be viewed anytime and anywhere as separate visual interface is available for viewing in your mobile phones too. Any changes you make to your collection are immediately intimated to your friend with whom you have shared the collection in twitter or facebook.

Cataloging Books:

Adding books in to your collection can be done by selection from the books database, by ISBN detail or manually. Cataloging from the books database is the easiest of all, as the attributes like author ISBN, content of the books are all updated on its own. Searching books from the database is done either by author’s name or the title of the book. Narrowing down to a specific book can be achieved using both title and author together as a search option. Attributes indicating if you have read the book or not, format of the book, subject of the book and date of purchase can be appended to a book in your collection or wish list after importing the book to your collection from the data base. All my friend’s to whom I have recommend it have been fascinated by the application. Addition of attributes and features like appending new front cover to your favorite book in the collection, takes customized cataloging to the next level. My friend’s love the way I summarize the book’s content in the notes column of the book’s attribute.

Most often cataloging could become cumbersome, when it is required to search out a particular book in your own collection. However, this is made easy in book collector connect, as we can display our collection as per filter settings based on attributes of a book like genre, subject, etc and first letter of the title of the book. Over a period of time, I started to know who the author is; I am more inclined to, as the statistics in my collection show the number of books of particular author I hold and read. We can even rate the book as per our choice by amending the attributes of a book in our collection.

Account Access:

Your collection can be either public or private. All your friends who have the URL can see your collection if it’s a public account. However, if your still want to withhold your personal details then, this is also possible for all public accounts via account settings. Unfortunately, the application does not allow you to download your collection in formats suitable for database migration and printing, I hope the application would allow this as it evolves over time.

Visit this site at http://connect.collectorz.com/books and post your reviews as comments.