Bookpedia App Reviews

Ive been using Delicious Library for several years now and have been increasingly disappointed in its featureset and overall usability. Moreover, until it released version 3 just a few days ago, it had been stagnant for several years. I decided to try looking for something new and found Bookpedia. Tried the demo and found it much more streamlined and does exactly what it promises. When I had questions or concerns, I was able to raise it in their online forums and found a lot of helpful advice -- from other users and Bruji employees. Moreover, it has a nice plugin framework that one can build his or her own search plugins to enhance what is an already great product. Even obscure books that I have in my collection that are in Chinese can almost always be found via the built-in Google Books search. After purchasing the full product and using almost daily for the last week or so, I am very satisfied. Just purchased the Pocketpedia companion app for my iPhone and it seems to work just right too! Thanks to Conor and his team.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no perfect book collection inventory software for the Mac. Bookpedia does ok. The interface is a straight-forward and functional app instead of the cartoony mess that Delicious Library has devolved to. It’s flexible about what it stores: lots of fields available, including custom ones. I wish I had more control over the pattern(s) used for book ID #s, rather than being forced into purely next-sequential-numbers. (BookCAT on Windows is the winner here). I wish I had the ability to quickly and easily print book labels for my collection (again, BookCAT on Windows wins here). My bluetooth scanner works ok with it, but the scanning interface in bookpedia is clunky, and constantly loses connection with my scanner, requiring a tedious set of hoops to be jumped through to get it working again. Also, the information pulled from Internet lookups is sporadic, and frequently wildly inaccurate (especially when pulled from Doghouse). I wish for the blissfully functional scanning from Delicious Library, but nothing else comes remotely close to that. This area could stand lots and lots of improvement. I like the fact that I can sync my collection across to my phone via Pocketpedia, although Pocketpedia is a usability nightmare: at least I have my collection at hand when I’m browsing a used book store. Cloud-based sync, rather than wifi-only would be awesome. Dropbox integration, perhaps? My biggest complaint about Bookpedia is that it’s really, really, realllllly slow to start. I have about 1500 books in my collection and it takes a full minute to start, with a spinning beachball the entire time. Yes, I have a lot of books, but I run it on a Retina MBP w/16G of RAM: it should run MUCH quicker than it does.

We’ve used Bookpedia for over 5 years and never had a problem. We are cataloging a small library with it and currently have about 8000 entries in it. It is working just fine with this many entries. Recently we had some questions about how to customize it for our specific needs and Conor, the developer, spent no small amount of time corresponding with me about how to achieve what would work for us. At one point he even took our file and worked on it to save us time. Can’t ask for better support. It is flexible and allows for customization which is key for us. Highly recommended. I am not aware of anything else like this for books for the Mac, especially at this price.

Running OSX 10.8.5 on my Mac. App Store says theres an update for Bookpedia, but it wont load. Trying to update returns this message: Bookpedia failed to download Use the Purchases page to try again. But trying to update from the Purchases page returns the same message. Whats wrong? And please fix it!

It tracks books in a way I like, so a lot of the features are there, but it sure likes to crash. Importing books and using the camera on my macbook was a bit slower then I hoped. I could get through maybe three or four books before it locked up and I had to restart the app. On the plus side the developers are very reponsive to issues. They just need to take some time to stabilize the app. Outside of the import issues, its a great app with some great features. If they can get the code cleaned up, its a 5 star app.

I had been using another book tracking software that was not really keeping up with modern operating systems. In fact the last upgrade put my database at risk. Entry Bookpedia and the very very responsive Bookpedia support team. They went so far as to update their software to manage a nuance in my file and resurrect my file. Wow. Really left me impressed. I have no hesitation recommending and supporting this great product. And, I have just started digging into this software. Again, heads and tails above the last product. Very pleased indeed.