Let's Collect

Please don't stop the music! And hand me my book, thank you. In this article we're looking at Linux applications that you may want to try out if you already have a collection of physical books, ebooks, CDs, or other media, or are just starting to collect. You can create a catalog that stores metadata of your collection items, index ebooks to make their content searchable, and rip CDs so that you can play them on the computer, too.

Keep Track with Tellico

Are you the collector type? If you want to keep track of your collections, you should try Tellico [1], a KDE program that lets you store and search information about your books, bibliographies, videos, music, video games, board games, coins, stamps, trading cards, comic books, and wines – and those are just the collectibles that Tellico has default templates for; you're free to set up collections for other topic areas, too.

You can use Tellico to deal with more than one category, so if you collect books, coins, and Blu-ray discs, you can create three collections and then store data in the appropriate collection files. That just makes sense, because the database tables will contain different fields – for example, a book does not have several audio tracks and subtitles, and a video disc was not produced in a mint that makes coins. Also, Tellico lets you add entries to your collection via a web search, and it suggests different search engines or catalogs, depending on the type of collectible. For example, you can use Bedetheque, Comic Vine, and Colnect to search for comic books and ISBNdb, Open Library, Google Book Search, and others for regular books. (Sadly, you cannot use Amazon search unless you have an Amazon Associates account and create an API key.)

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