It’s been a fun Christmas, being the first time in 7 years I’ve been home for the holidays.  Of course, nothing can top the ticket home that I received (unless it is the various gifts that the kids put so much effort into getting together for me).  I did, however, get another very nice gift worth mentioning.

My mom found something that, as soon as she saw it, she knew would be just right for me.  It is a book, movie, and music cataloging system from Collectorz.  It allows you to create a file for each book, with pictures of the front and back cover, a summary of the book, and all the bibliographical information.  All that is downloaded from Amazon, or from one of several other spots that you can choose from (whether Barnes and Noble, the Library of Congress, or various international sites). 

Where it all gets really cool, though, is when you get to the information you can put into the system yourself.  There is a large section for notes, which will help to keep the notes for a certain text conveniently at hand whenever needed.  I like having my own notes so readily available like that.  Also, you can keep up to date with which books in the catalog you own, which are on your wish list, where those you don’t own are located (public library, etc.), whether you’ve read them and when, and all kinds of information like that.  You can also add in information that is not so easily available from online sites, like who wrote the foreword, the name of the ghostwriter or editor, which edition of the book you have, and so forth.  It’s great to have all this information at your fingertips, especially if you do much study from various books, and like the idea of having it all there, easy to search, in one place.  And the feature I am really enjoying is the space for adding links to websites.  So, for instance, in the file on Patricia Wood’s Lottery, I have links to the 3 blog entries containing the book discussion Merry has hosted.  It makes it easy for me to revisit the discussion whenever I want.

To make it even better, you can get a barcode scanner from Collectorz.  That means that you don’t have to key in the info in order to search for the title you are looking for.  The scanner reads the ISBN, and then finds the information from the various online sites.

Santa was very kind to me this year.  I thought it was just the sort of gift that some readers here might like to know about.