From history. Want to sort out your books? Use Alexandria!

If you have a bunch of books in your room and you’d like to organize your list as well as figure out who borrowed which book, Alexandria is a good tool for you. I have been adding new books to my collection so I chose this tool so it’s easier for me to figure things out. This tool has a disadvantage though: it doesn’t seem to find all the books I have and so I could not add everything yet. In any case I could still use it because I have a lot of foreign books anyway.

Alexandria is a GNOME application to help you manage your book collection.

It is written in Ruby and is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later).

Just install Alexandria using your Linux distro’s package manager. Else, download Alexandria as a Debian package or as source.

Adding books is easy!
You just need to click the “Add book” button and then start searching for the book. Search criteria could be its ISBN, title or author. Once you find it, you will even see the cover on the results if any is available. Click it to be added.

Mark the books as “want” or “read” or “own.”
Whether you own it, read it or want it, you could indicate it by clicking on the book’s information and you will get a dialog box with the details. Just check the appropriate box and there you go. As you can see, Alexandria is good for coming up with your wishlist.

Track them down.
No need to keep racking your brains as to who borrowed your books and since when they’ve had it with them because you could note that too. From the list of books, select the book which has been borrowed and enter the name of the borrower.

This is really nifty! Now I wish even books from the Philippines will be included in this application. If I really want to, I should check out how they could get the information.