15-Minute Reviews :: Libellus Book Organizer v2.0.1

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Libellus Book Organizer (Also known as Libellus, Organize!) version 2.0.1 by Tantillus – An application to aid you in managing your book collection.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Libellus is a book organizer and manager software with key points: Very intuitive user interface, small in size, and fast.

Now it’s getting better with the new feature that enables user of Libellus to search any books anywhere, view book’s review, import book’s details into database or wishlist, or even buying book securely. All in a single click!”

Quick Pros

• Easy to find your way around via buttons along top
• Ability to export to HTML or CSV handy for using with other applications or posting book list
• Favorite and Wishlist functionality handy

Quick Cons

• Have to scroll to see all information on a book (No window re-sizing)
• Difficult to delete all preloaded books. authors, publishers & categories – No option to start new database
• Could not delete two of the publishers
• Have to pre-add category, publisher and authors before creating a new book
• First time adding book, no book appeared; Second time and on, application crashed – Appears linked to two ‘stuck’ publishers
• Lists in add book page could become very long and awkward to use – Especially author area
• Search functions’ ‘Buy’ button appears to be an affiliate link to Amazon
• Could use a lot more features such as online references, tree-style categories, book checkout for loaning and more
• Overall kludgy feel to the application

Expansion

With the day of digital here, there is a growing number of books available on the market covering so many different aspects. Even with the advent of a digital lifestyle in today’s world, so many people rely on hard copies of books due to their simplicity, ease of use, portability and format, to name a few. This application is here to help pull together.

When first launching into the application, the interface looks relatively easy to get going; buttons along the top, categories on the left, and the remainder of the screen dedicated to the table for books. Now, my first thing I noticed is that the window is not resizable, so some of the information is off the side of the screen, requiring you to scroll and the reorganize/resize the columns. In my opinion, there should be the ability to resize the entire window, because at this screen format, there is no way to be able to view all pertinent information without having something cut off.

I found some interesting functionality in this program. First, there is the ability to export all of the book list to either a HTML file or a CSV file. This could he handy for posting your book list online or sending to a friend, or take it into another application to manage your database further. There is also the Wishlist; By adding the title and ISBN, you can have your own list of wanted books so that you don’t forget which books you want. Finally, to top it off, there is also the ‘Favorite’ screen, showing you all the books you’ve flagged as a favorite. This could be handy for going back to read old favorites you haven’t read in years.

I did have a lot of difficulty with this application and found a lot lacking which needs to be built upon however. First off, the application comes preloaded with a sizable collection of books, authors, publishers and categories already built in. It took me well over 5 minutes just to go through and obliterate all of them; The process for books is the most tedious, but altogether is not a pleasant experience indeed. To top that off, two of the publishers would not delete no matter what and became the root of more issues later during my testing. (The two publishers were Bedford/St. Martin’s and O’Reilly Media, Inc.)

I went to load my first book into the database, and came upon some troubles quickly. I found that in the book add page that you could not add the author(s) right in the page; You have to pre-add them in the author page. Same thing went for the publisher and the category; After you’re done going to the three other pages to add that informaton, then you can add a new book. Awkward at best in my opinion and too time-consuming of a process, especially if you have a sizable collection. To top that off, the first time I added a book I used one of the two publishers which wouldn’t delete (For testing purposes), and the book vanished after I clicked add – Did not appear or anything. I tried a second time, making sure I had everything right, when I clicked add book, the whole application crashed with no error or anything. Did this over and over; Even using the Repair DB function on the option page did not get rid of the category, nor did it bring back the lost book(s) or allow me to use the two bad publishers again. I did finally get books added when I used different publishers, but this really could become a headache.

Search function is pretty handy in general – One part I am not fond of however is that the outbound Buy URL appears to have an affiliate tag in it, meaning that the author of this application will profit further upon your purchase of a book through the application; The application really needs to state this somewhere clearly. It didn’t impress seeing ‘tag=libellus-20’ in the URL – I’m not an Amazon user, but I assume this indicates the affiliate connection.

There is a lot of features this application really could benefit from but doesn’t. The application does have a built-in search function for online, but is awkward to use to add new books to your list to save you time and effort; The application could have really dealt with a lookup function right on the add book page where you punch in the ISBN or title and hit lookup and inserts the information if only one match, or bring up the window to let you choose which is right. The application could have also grown with tree-based categories, as well as the ability to add a book to more than one category; There could also be a quick-link from the book to Amazon’s reviews to see what others say about books and more. There is a lot that this application can do to grow.

Final Verdict

While this application does show some promise for future, the database issue with the publishers mixed with the overall awkwardness of use makes this a difficult application to run with. While free, it may be worth a tinker; However with this database issue, I am concerned about the durability of the database and would warn even free users to take caution that their database doesn’t corrupt fully. That said, $14.95 might have been a good price if this were a well-built application, but unfortunately at this point I do not feel the application is mature enough to be worth purchasing at this time.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, July 24, 2007