Library

I have a quite substantial electronic library, built up over the past 5 years or so, consisting of audio books and ebooks.

I keep an index of the books in a single color-coded Excel file with all sorts of data, such as author, title, series, which members of the family have read the book, the source of the book, whether the book is duplicated as both ebook and audio book (there are 535 books in that category, about 10% of the total), and...

Each of the audio books has a synopsis attached as a comment to the book title cell. The ebooks do not. I can copy the synopses from the 535 matching audio books to the appropriate ebooks, but that still leaves more than 2000 ebooks to "synopsisize".

So now the question: Does anybody know of a website similar in concept to imdb.com, but for books rather than movies? (For those unfamiliar with imdb.com, they have information about and plot synopses of just about every movie ever made.) If I could go to a single website to find synopses of the ebooks I have, it would save me a great deal of time and trouble.

Ideas?

tanstaafl.

Amazon?

Goodreads?

Look into a bit of software called Calibre.

It can source metadata including synopsis from several locations. That can be done in batch mode. The lookup depends on it finding the isbn # inside the book. Works for the majority of ebooks. The rest will need to have the isbn set manually.

Plus it can provide a home content server for your books.

Don't know if it can manage audiobooks, never tried. There is a plugin. This post discusses the plugin.

This post lists many sources for book metadata.

Calibre is the heart and soul of my library management system. I couldn't manage without it, and I have studied it and learned it enough now that I can probably use about 20% of its capabilities.

That's a bit of a problem. The metadata of many of my ebooks does not include the isbn#.

Audio books are not a problem -- I have all their metadata set up and updated correctly, including the synopses that are kept as comments in the book title cell of the index. These synopses were relatively easy to acquire but the eBook synopses, not so much.

Some of those sources look useful, I'll explore them. Even if I have to Google search each book individually by author/title, I can still plow through 100 or so a day before my eyes start to cross, so I can finish the project in about a month.

Can't you just get the ISBN off Amazon?

And wouldn't such product fetch the ISBN (and all other metadata) for you based on title alone? At least offer you a limited selection of matching titles to choose from? I'm pretty sure a number of Mac-based book catalog apps will do this, so I'd expect the same from their Windows counterparts and contemporaries.

The books that are from Amazon already have the isbn numbers as part of their metadata. But I have a fair number of books from more... uh, dubious sources.

However, I see that Amazon is now putting a Book Description paragraph with each book they list, or at least with the half dozen that I just sampled. Their collection is over a million books now, so chances are that they will have many if not most of the books in my collection. As you (and RobotCaleb) suggested, Amazon may be what I'm looking for.

tanstaafl.

My old company partnered with Readerware. It does look-ups to the Library of Congress database and Amazon as well as several other databases and can search any of these by title, author, or whatever.

Well worth the $40.