It’s decent, but far from perfect

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.

ohTHATaaronbrown about Bookpedia