Program for creating an electronic book library. We organize an electronic library. Advantages and disadvantages of the program

Free cataloger for accounting books in the home (and not only) library. Perfect for accounting for e-books, because the kit comes with a lot of convenient chips for working with e-books.

With the advent of the computer in every home, many hitherto familiar things began to seem like some kind of anachronisms. So, for example, the computer has almost completely replaced devices such as radios from our homes, since today we can easily listen to radio online.

Or another example: armed with special programs, you can easily use the Internet.

But this universalization of computers affects not only the field of technology, but also many other aspects of our lives. A striking example of this is the huge popularity of e-books. Many PC users today are unwittingly beginning to increasingly prefer e-books to their paper counterparts. Their advantages are obvious:

1. availability (sold half the price, or even distributed free of charge);
2. ease of use (you can make many bookmarks with the ability to quickly switch, as well as automatically search for the desired piece of text);
3. compactness (do not require storage space outside the PC and have relatively small file sizes).

And this is not a complete list... Needless to say, over time, the user may need to structure his electronic library, which is growing every day. So, today we'll talk about how competently and in the shortest possible time it is possible to organize a meaningful catalog of all your electronic (and paper, in principle) books on your computer.

Among the many cataloging programs, it is worth highlighting free development Caliber. To date, this is one of the best free applications that allow you to create informative and complete catalogs of e-books, getting data about them from the Internet! That is, you do not have to manually fill in all the fields, starting with the abstract and ending with the date of publication of the book - the program will do it for you!

You can compare the functionality of the program with paid developments, such as Library Manager.

Comparison of the book cataloger Caliber with a paid analogue Library Manager

In addition to all of the above, Caliber has a number of other features that are often not available even in paid applications:

• built-in RSS aggregator;
• built-in content server;
• integration with readers;
• scan the hard drive for e-book files;
• presence of plugins.

Installation and preparation for work

On the official website of the program, there is a portable version of Caliber that does not require installation. If you are a fan of portable software, you can download this version.

Here we will consider the installation of the standard version of Caliber. Despite the English-language interface of the program installer, the installation process is not difficult and practically comes down to confirming that you have read the license agreement (tick "I agree") and, as usual, the subsequent button press Next.

After the installation is complete, Caliber will offer us a program setup wizard:

At the first stage, we will have to choose the interface language of our cataloger and the folder in which the created library will be stored. In the first case, it is clear that you need to select the Russian language :) But as for the library folder, I would not recommend using the defaults (the My Documents folder).

Since we plan to expand our library in the future, a lot of space should be allocated for it. This means that it is best to create a new folder not on the system partition of the hard drive, but on any logical one (for example, Disk D) with enough free memory.

At the second stage of the setup, Caliber will prompt us to select the device on which you usually read your e-books (it is assumed that you have a reader):

If your device is not in the list (or it does not exist at all, as in our case), then you need to do the following: in the "Manufacturers" list, select the "Generic" item, and in the list of devices that opens, mark any item you like (for example, smartphone).

We press “Next”, after which we are congratulated on the successful setup, and with a clear conscience we press the “Finish” button, after which we get to the main Caliber window ...

Interface Caliber

The program interface is quite simple and convenient. Visually, it can be divided into several parts. At the top there is a ribbon with function buttons, which mostly have drop-down menus containing additional commands related to a particular function.

The main space is occupied by a list of your e-books, which you can sort by any of the available columns. To the left of the list, you can see an additional sorting panel with a bunch of various filters, and to the right - appearance selected book and short information about it with links to the folder and the book itself.

The bottommost narrow strip under the catalog is used to display the status bar and three additional buttons that allow you to enable / disable additional side panels and the book demonstration panel (about it a little).

Working with Caliber

Let's proceed directly to creating a catalog of your books. In Caliber, a corresponding button is used to add a book. If you click not on it itself, but on the drop-down menu on the right, then we will be able to select one of possible ways additions:

Looking at the menu, we will see that the first three items allow you to scan the selected folders and automatically find in them all the books that will be added to the catalog. This method is convenient if you have a fairly extensive database, but get ready for the fact that your list will not contain any additional information about books - it will then have to be edited manually.

If you want to immediately get a convenient and most importantly informative catalog of your books, then it is better to choose the "Add by ISBN" method. ISBN is a unique international number of a book under which it is listed in global archives to automate its search.

If the book you want to add is quite new (published after the 90s), then there is a high probability that, knowing only its number, you will be able to get maximum information about it: title, annotation, author, and even cover. Accordingly, all this will not need to be entered manually;)

So, after pressing the button, the following window will appear in front of you:

This is actually the window for entering book numbers. I note that you can enter an almost unlimited number of ISBNs at the same time, but the larger the list, the longer it will take the program to find all the information you need.

Click "Ok" and wait until the scanning of Internet databases for the availability of data about the books you entered is completed. If such data is found, then a small window will appear in front of you offering a choice of the method and volume of downloads:

Since we want to get the most informative and beautiful catalog, I advise you to click the "Download both" button. After pressing it, a data loading task will be automatically generated (task completion is indicated in the lower right corner of the Caliber working window. Upon completion of the tasks, we will receive all the records about the books we need in our catalog.

A plus this method adding books is that, having spent minimal effort on entering book numbers, we immediately get the most informative catalog at the output. In addition, in this way you can create a list of your paper publications for the census of your home library! The downside lies in the fact that electronic versions of books will then have to be attached manually :(.

Editing book metadata in Caliber

Another way to get information about the desired book from the Internet is to search by metadata, the main of which is the title of the book and its author. Let me explain with an example...

Let's say we want to add data about the books "War and Peace", which have been stored for a long time both on our bookshelf and on our hard drive :). We will proceed from the fact that you did not use the automatic addition of books to the catalog, so first we will have to go to the drop-down menu of the "Add Books" button and select the "Add an empty book" item there.

Now let's find the newly created book, select it and click the "Edit metadata" button on the top panel (if you used auto-add, then you just need to find the book you need and do the same).

In the window that opens, in the upper left part of it, we find the fields for entering the title and author of the book and prescribe them, after which we click the "Download metadata" button in the lower part of the window.

The search for the book will start in the largest book depositories and bookstores on the Internet. To reduce the time of the search engine, I advise you to leave only Russian-language resources and large stores such as Ozone, Amazon and Google in the search list.

Upon completion of the search, you will be presented with a table with its results:

If there are several results found, then we select the option that contains both the book cover and its abstract, that is, the information is as complete as possible. Highlight the desired row in the table and click the "Next" button. We will return to the metadata editing window, but we will see that almost all the fields in it are already filled in, which is what we needed!

Now we just have to click on the "Add format to this book" button (upper right corner) and select the e-book file that you want to associate with the created catalog entry.

Convert eBooks to Caliber

A fairly convenient and powerful e-book converter is built into the Caliber program. It allows you to convert between books in EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PDF, PMLZ, RB, RTF, SNB, TCR, TXT and ZIP formats. The only drawback, in my opinion, is the lack of support for the DJVU and CHM formats, which are quite widespread in our country.

In order to call the converter window, just click the "Convert Books" button:

A window will open in which you can fine-tune the conversion settings, such as the content of the book, its structure and appearance, but most users obviously do not want to delve into all the subtleties, so the main functions are placed in the main Metadata tab.

Here you only need to specify the output format of the book (upper right corner) and, if desired, change the metadata that the converted book will contain, and then click the "Ok" button.

Reading e-books in Caliber

As mentioned above, Caliber has a built-in e-book viewer. It supports most formats and can be used as the default viewer for any of them.

To access the book viewer, you need to select the desired book in the catalog and click the corresponding button - "View":

Managing the built-in viewer is quite simple. The main part of the space in it is occupied directly by the book itself, and additional elements controls are placed on the left side panel.

Among the buttons on this panel, we should note the button for displaying the contents of the book (if any) and the button for managing bookmarks. In the upper part of the viewer window you will find the fast navigation and full text search lines.

However, it is worth noting that, for example, when you try to open a PDF file, it will most likely be opened in another program that is assigned by the system as the default viewer for this format. If you want a certain e-book format to still open through Caliber, then you will either have to uninstall the third-party viewer or manually reconfigure the file associations.

I really love books, and recently wrote about how you can.

The electronic library is no less of a problem, it clutters up gigabytes no less than paper books litter cupboards and shelves. When I come across a description of an interesting book on the Internet, I immediately download it and it often happens that I simply forget to read it, because something else no less interesting immediately comes across.

My “Books” folder, in general, is quite organized - divided into categories by genre, within genres - by authors, I immediately throw freshly downloaded books into the right folders. However, for me, spoiled by technological progress, it already seems inconvenient to go into “Books” every time, look for what has not yet been read, unzip each file, remember what I read and where I stopped, what I was going to read and what I did not have time to download, etc. .d.

Therefore, the task arose - to find a convenient program for organizing e-books. Which, firstly, would store all downloaded books, sorting by authors and genres, secondly, would allow you to make marks on read and planned for reading e-books, and thirdly - sewed my coats and mended my boots She knew how to read different formats and allowed to leave comments on the books she read.

Gathering together the results of my searches, I wrote this review.

So, review of programs for organizing and reading e-books:

1. ICE Book Reader — convenient reader and part-time cataloger. What can:

• stores e-books in huge quantities (up to 250,000 pieces). Moreover, it stores the files of books, and not the paths to them. That is, if you move the book file on your computer to another location, this will not affect the operation of the program in any way, the book will still be available
• sorts them into collections
• convenient division into categories (by author, by genre, marked for reading, etc.)
• implemented search by various criteria
• supports different formats, including archives
• a huge number of settings for comfortable reading (what functions are not there, I won’t even list them) special attention deserves automatic scrolling - when the text itself crawls across the page, completely invisible to the eye
• using a wireless mouse as a remote control, you can even read from the other side of the room (by setting, of course, a larger font)
• can read aloud to you (although this is not for the faint of heart)
• makes bookmarks
• and much more (of the extremely useful built-in alarm clock sunk into my soul)

Looking ahead, I will say that it was on her that I stopped my final choice. Although the taste and color, as you know, all felt-tip pens are different. So read on.

2.bookshelf- a surprisingly beautiful program with an originally implemented interface. When you open the program, a real bookshelf appears before your eyes, on which are the books that you put there. On the spines are the names and size in kilobytes. Click - read. A large number of subtle settings for reading, allowing you to read with the greatest comfort for you, and - oh, how the bookmarks function is implemented! A green maple leaf serves as a bookmark! (However, you can also upload your own bookmarks)

3. Bookseer- another cataloging program. Arranges books by authors, genres, shows when you last opened a book and how many percent you read. Interesting feature this program - it does not require installation. That is, you can burn books to a USB flash drive, install BookSeer there, add books to the catalog of this program and read anywhere you like, from any computer. The downside is that it stores in its database not the books themselves, but links to them. That is, if the book file is moved or deleted, it will no longer be able to read it. However, this problem can be solved by writing relative paths to the file. But these are technical details. There are not very many reading settings, more precisely, very few. But this program is quite versatile, with its help you can catalog not only books, but also videos, and links, and in general, everything that can be cataloged.

4. Total Book Organizer- a simple but smart program. With one movement of the hand, it will add all your books to its database, scattering them into categories. It will be issued in an already neat form - with a cover and brief description. You can sort books as you like - by author, by genre, by keywords etc. There is a “I’m going to read” section, which I really liked.

5.All My Books- this shareware program will independently find in Internet sources and download the necessary books for you by title, author or ISBN number. Provides complete information about the book - year of publication, names of translators, reviews, annotations, binding, circulation and colorful cover (suddenly this is important to someone). Visually represents your library using templates. Export, import, search by all sorts of given conditions. There is such a necessary thing as a manager of given books (so as not to forget who and what took from you to read)

6.FB2 Librarian- initially this librarian program was developed for reading books exclusively in fb2 - format, but the latest versions support other formats used in e-books (although in this case manual minimal description is required). The program can change skins, it is possible to insert your ratings and comments. Convenient search, categorization and sorting according to different criteria.

7. LibRus- cataloger of electronic books, "sharpened" for the Librusek library. That is, the program databases are updated directly from the Librusec website. I don’t even know what to say, where are the pluses and where are the minuses. Have not tried. And Librusek has recently become half paid, which is not encouraging.

8. MyHomeLib- this program allows you to create an unlimited number of book collections, sort them as you please, work with lists of books in tabular mode, as well as find out ratings and reviews about books, leave comments. It is possible to connect external libraries, including the ubiquitous Librusek. There are a lot of functions for working with e-books.

9. PSD Home Library paid (500 rubles), but a convenient program for cataloging books and maintaining a home library.

If you have anything to add to this list, please add it in the comments!

Each user of e-books will someday be interested in the question of their structuring or even creating an electronic library of all accumulated publications on their PC or laptop. As an alternative, books can be stored on the reader, but there are a number of limitations: a relatively small amount of memory, a specific interface, and hence the general inconvenience, etc. Especially before getting to the reading room (at least in Russia), the book usually transits through the computer. Accordingly, some kind of program is needed e-library, which would perform all the functions necessary for convenient use of the collection. I will make a reservation that we are talking primarily about creating an orderly home collection e-books and the term "electronic library" is used in a somewhat simplified sense.

The first digital library program that came to mind when writing this article turned out to be the brainchild of a foreign origin, caliber. True, if you translate the description from the site, the definition of caliber is somewhat different: it is a free e-book library management application developed by e-book users for e-book users. All the functionality, the completeness of which made me mention this program in the first place, is divided into 6 main categories.
1) Library management. This includes the establishment of all metadata for the book, incl. tags and comments, search for books, export of the collection to the hard disk in a systematic folder structure. It is interesting that while watching the demo video, I did not notice any hierarchical structure in the program itself. But the selection of books can be easily filtered by metadata, whether it is the author, publisher, tag, or something else.
2) Convert e-book formats
3) Synchronization with e-book readers
4) Downloading news from the Internet and converting them into an e-book format
5) E-book viewer
6) Content server for online access to your book collection
The statistics of the use of the program, given on the site, is amazing. The total number of users is 1646508, of which 2% are from Russia. Such a figure, you will agree, involuntarily impresses. You can watch a demo video, download the program on the official website.

From a foreign one, I would also like to mention Greenstone. However, this is not just a program for creating an electronic library that can be used at home, but a whole platform or framework on the basis of which electronic online libraries are built. Pretty powerful software used by many large organizations different countries peace. It was originally developed with the support of UNESCO and Human info at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. A complete list of such products can be found on the English wiki in the Digital libray article and the frameworks section. And how this product can be used on your computer is well described in Andrey Fedorov's blog.

For home use, you need something simpler. Consider some Russian developments. MyHomeLib is a program for managing collections of electronic books in any format. It has all the main features of this type of program: a convenient tree view, support for popular formats, simple and complex search, various ratings and reviews, connecting user scripts. Separately, it should be noted that work with the archives of the notorious library Lib.rus.ec has been implemented. You can see screenshots, full description, reviews on the developer's website.

While studying the available information on the topic, I came across an overview of two more programs that can be used to create a collection of an electronic library. They were originally intended to organize the paper home library, i.e. establishments of information about each book. For example, a shelf, a read mark, any other attribute, and so on. By adding the file attachment function, such programs became suitable for working with e-books. They are called BookSnake and Unicat. The review can be read. Of course, for users of readers, such software is of little relevance, but to create a complete collection of all books, both electronic and paper, it is very well suited.

All disassembled products have their own characteristics and perform their own unique functions. I am sure that everyone will be able to find software that satisfies their requirements. If you use any other programs, write in the comments. Feedback on disassembled is also welcome!

Caliber 3.40.1 free download program with which you can organize your electronic library. Caliber is easy to use and supports many formats and allows you to convert e-books.

Reading e-books is becoming more and more popular. Every year the number of printed literature is getting smaller, and new devices, readers, such as: Amazon Kindle, iPad, PocketBook, and others with which you can read books in electronic format. But, just like a paper, physical library requires order and systematization, so does an electronic library and a large number of digital books need to be organized. And if you often read a lot, then this is especially useful for you. For such needs, the Caliber program is designed.

Description of Caliber

First of all, this program is designed to store and organize your personal electronic library. She acts as a cataloguer. All e-books are sorted and ordered. And in the left part of the main window there is a search by criteria. For example, by author, format, language, and more.

On first start Caliber programs it will prompt you to select the device you will normally use to read books. There is a large list of devices, almost all that are present on the market, namely: Kindle Fire, iPod, PocketBook and various Android devices. This is intended so that you can easily send books to your device without worrying about the format, because Caliber itself uses the conversion of books to most E-book formats. For example, convert from FB2 or MOBI to PDF.

Also, Caliber offers not only the cataloging of books and their storage, but also reading. Yes, the program provides an interface for reading e-books in different formats. When reading, you can customize the font, make bookmarks and more.

Also, with the help Caliber you can download books. This function allows you to search for books on the Internet in various sources. And when choosing a particular book, it will be possible to download it, if it is available for free, or, otherwise, buy it.

Attention for Windows XP you need to download Caliber 1.48 version.

Specifications:

Version: Caliber 3.40.1
Russian language
Status: Free
Author: Kovid Goyal
System: Windows
Size: 53.8 MB

Free program for accounting books in the library.

Computerization today affects more and more different industries. Not so long ago, in Ukraine, a decree was issued on the computerization of libraries educational institutions. And everything would be fine, but only, as always, by issuing the appropriate hardware and software no one in the ministries cared. And so it went - let's go ...

Who started creating library databases on a PC using office applications (in Access or Excel), and who began to look for "cracks" to various paid library management systems. However, it turns out that there are quite simple and convenient free programs for this!

Today I will introduce you to one wonderful library management system developed by our fellow countryman and a simple computer science teacher for the needs of his school. This program is called MyLib. With its help, you can quite easily create a database for the entire library and monitor the issuance of books to students, students or teachers. In terms of its capabilities, MyLib resembles the paid Book Accounting program:

Comparison of the MyLib program with a paid analogue Accounting for books

From the comparison, we can see that MyLib is somewhat behind paid applications in terms of functionality. However, the program benefits from a simple and understandable interface organization, and also compensates for some shortcomings due to direct access to the database, which can be easily edited using modern office suites.

An additional nice point is that the application does not require installation :).

In the archive downloaded from our site you will find two versions of MyLib: Russian and Ukrainian. We will consider an example with the Russian version, however, everything written below also applies to the Ukrainian version.

For greater convenience, let's unpack the archive with the required version of the application into a separate folder on the hard drive, and then run the MyLib.exe executable file. The main window of the program will open in front of us:

MyLib Interface

In the main window, we see a list of authors of books (left column) present in our library, as well as a list and description of the books of the selected author (right). At the bottom of the main window, we can also see information about the issue of the selected book. At the top of the MyLib working window there are two additional working tabs (Search and List of students), as well as a button for adding new books.

Working with MyLib

We should start by creating a database of books. To add a new book to the database, just click the "Add new book" button and enter the required information about it in the window that opens:

Unfortunately, this window does not have some fields, such as ISBN, the number of pages, and some others, however, with a special desire, such fields can be manually added to the program database (how to do this,). Of course, you will not get access through the program, however, this method is quite suitable for printing results from the database;).

Click the "Add" button and get the book you just entered in the list:

Please note that if you have several copies of a book, you will have to add them again!

By highlighting a book in the "Author's Books" catalog, you can make changes to its data, as well as give the book to a student or teacher. To do this, just click the "Issue a book" button and enter the reader's data in the text line that appears. The date of issue will be set automatically:

Now, to return the book, it will be enough for us to click the "Accept book" button.

Working with third-party databases

The student has been successfully added, however, for the convenience of working with a large number of people, I would advise creating another reader database. Unfortunately, it is impossible to create such a database using MyLib, but nothing prevents us from filling it directly using MS Access (preferably) or OO Base. To do this, open the folder into which we previously unpacked MyLib and find the data.mdb file:

We will need to open the selected database. For this, the module of the Microsoft Office Access package is best suited. When trying to open a database, Access will ask us whether to block unsafe expressions (to which we proudly answer “NO” :)) and warn us again about the unsafeness of our actions. But we are not afraid :), so we will press the "Open" button and we will see the following window:

It is easy to guess that in order to create a database of readers, we need to open the Pupils table by double-clicking on it with the left mouse button:

In the table that opens, we will first find only two lines. The first will contain the student we created earlier (in the example - Ivanov Ivan Petrovich), and the second will be empty (except for the inscription (Counter) in the first cell).

Now we need to select the line with our first reader (left-clicking on the square in front of the line) and right-clicking the context menu, select the "Copy" item. Now, in a similar way, select an empty line (with the inscription (Counter)) and select the "Insert" item in the context menu.

We will have a copy of the previous record, in which we only need to change the data in the “Name” column to the desired ones. Since MyLib does not have a special field for indicating the class in which the student is studying, it would be best if you indicate the class or group number before the student's name;).

Thus, you can quickly find all your readers in a fairly extensive database. Fortunately, MyLib sorts all entries alphabetically, so you can safely add new library users in any order.

So, we have created a database of readers. It's time to look at the fruits of your labor. To do this, launch MyLib and go to its third tab - "Students and issued books":

Here we will see a well-ordered list of all our readers, and to the right of them a number that indicates the number of books they have taken. If a student returns a book to you, it is enough to highlight him in the list, select the book he returns and click the "Accept" button. The book will again be in the public domain, and it will be possible to give it out again.

Database search

The last function we have to check is the search function. Go to the second tab of the program ("Search for books"):

Here we have two search options: by authors or by book titles. We choose the most suitable for us, fill in the appropriate text field, click the "Search" button and get the result in the list below. Please note that if there is no book corresponding to the specified search parameters in the database, then the list will remain empty, and you will not see any additional notifications.

Advantages and disadvantages of the program

• simple interface and program management;
• unlimited number of records in databases;
• direct access to the main database of the program;
• convenient system for tracking issued books;
• the presence of a convenient mechanism for searching the database of books.

• no built-in reader list editor;
• there is no function to import, export and print data from the program;
• it is not possible to add additional fields to the description of books.

conclusions

Despite the rather significant shortcomings, after skillful “file processing”, the MyLib program becomes an indispensable tool for any librarian! However, you can use the application not only in institutions, but also as a cataloger for your home library.

This use case is generally ideal, since you do not have to manually edit the database at all, and you will add new readers (friends and acquaintances who take books from you) as needed. Using MyLib, you will always know who, when and what books have been taken from you, which means that you will always have your entire library under your supervision.

P.S. It is allowed to freely copy and quote this article, provided that an open active link to the source is indicated and the authorship of Ruslan Tertyshny is preserved.