Help
Book Catalogue is exactly what it sounds like; a simple application that allows you to create a list of all your books. Books can be added either manually, by ISBN, or by barcode. This is an open source android application – for more information please visit http://wiki.github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue/
If something nasty happens, the first thing to do is plug your phone into a computer, connect it as a disk drive, and copy the entire ‘bookCatalogue’ directory.
Next, post an issue in our forums at: https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue/issues
We will get back to you as soon as we can.
And remember, it is always a good idea to export your data before an upgrade or after lots of new data has been added.
The bulk of this screen lists your entire book collection. By default your books will be sorted by Author (last name). If you click on the 
icon it will expand to display all books for that author. You can change the sort order by selecting 
from the menu, which will provide 6 options; sort by author, title, series, genre, loaned and read/unread.
When you quit, Book Catalogue will remember all your current settings, including how it is sorted, current bookshelf, and which book you are focused on.
Other display options under menu include 
and 
which will expand or collapse all authors (or series, loans, etc depending on your sort setting).
If you long click on a book title (not author name) it will bring up a context menu which will allow you to delete a book or open/edit a book at a specific tab.
At the top of the main screen is the bookshelf selector. 
This will tell you which bookshelf you are currently viewing and, if you click on it, allow you to change the current bookshelf.
There is a special bookshelf called “All Books” which allows you to display all books in the database regardless of the bookshelf they are in.
From the menu you can choose to add a book in one of four methods.
1. By Barcode 
2. By ISBN (or amazon ASIN) 
3. By Author Name and Title 
4. Manually 
You must have the zxing barcode scanner installed to use this function.
If you point the camera at the barcode (ISBN) on the back of the book it will scan and start searching the Internet to try and automatically populate the fields. Please be aware that there is also a situation where the barcode is an older UPC number, in this case while it looks like an ISBN it is not. You will most often find these in older trade/pulp books. Another clue for these is if they have a barcode on the inside cover. The inside barcode is the the isbn barcode and will scan/search correctly.
That is actually a rather large issue with ISBN’s. For full info have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number
Books published in the 70’s and early 80’s may have an ISBN but not a barcode. In this situation you can type in the ISBN from the back of the book and it will, once again, search the internet for information regarding the book. ISBN’s can either be a 13 digit ISBN or a 10 digit ISBN, where only the first three and last characters are different. In this situation both are correct and will return the correct search.
You can also use the standard android keyboard to key in an Amazon ASIN, which is useful for eBooks.
If there is not an ISBN or the ISBN is not finding any details, you can always search by using the Author name and book title. This is not as accurate as using the ISBN, but can provide more information.
If you have a book without a barcode or ISBN or a book that is not available in Google Books or Amazon than you will need to add the book manually. Fill in as many fields as appropriate. The fields on this page will be pre-populated if you have successfully added a book via barcode or ISBN.
Note: depending on which field you have set to be visible (see Field Visibility under Administration) you will see different fields to this screenshot.
The Author, Series and Publisher fields will try and suggest options based on existing books. Once complete, click on the 
button at the bottom of the screen. This will automatically refresh the screen adding additional tabs to the top and allowing you to fill in more details.
There are up to 4 tabs available when editing a book. Book Details, Your Comments, Loan Book and Anthology Titles.
This is the same screen as “add book”. The only difference is the “Anthology” checkbox; which will activate/deactivate the anthology tab. You also have more options to modify the book thumbnail. If you long hold on the thumbnail you will get a menu with three options.
1. “Delete Thumbnail” will remove the saved thumbnail from the database. This is useful if the wrong thumbnail was automatically downloaded.
2. “Add Thumbnail from Gallery” allows you to use a photo from your gallery as the book thumbnail.
3. “Add Thumbnail from Camera” allows you to take a photo of the book cover to use as a thumbnail. It assumes the book is in portrait orientation. Which brings us to…
4. “Rotate Thumbnail” if the book cover is in the wrong orientation this will rotate the cover 90 degrees clockwise. You may need to do this several times to get it to the correct orientation.
This tab is to enter any personal information regarding this book; these are fields such as have you read the book, your rating, any notes, is your copy signed, etc. Press 
to save your changes
This screen allows you to record who you have loaned a book to. This, in combination with “Sort by Loan” is useful to keep track of people who have your books. The Name field will try and suggest people based on existing your contact list.
Once a book has been returned you simply press the “Returned” button to mark it as returned
If your book is an anthology of stories, this will let you store the titles of each story in the book.
Select the checkbox at top of the screen is all of the stories in the anthology are written by the primary author. This will save space on the screen and remove the author field from the add section below. You can add as many titles as you want by typing them in the boxes at the bottom of the screen.
Each new title will appear at the bottom of the list, though using the 
buttons you can move a title up or down in the list. If you want to edit a title, just click on it and it will appear in the fields at the bottom, and the “Add” button will change to a “Save” button. To delete a title, just long click on it and a context menu will appear with the delete option.
There is an experimental function to try and automatically populate the anthology titles. Simply click on the menu button and the option will appear.
This will only work about 50% of the time, and may not be 100% correct in that case. If it finds any it will confirm the titles before they get saved into the database.
In the main menu (on the book list screen) you can select 
to goto the administration screen. There are 4 tabs available Help (this information), Administration, Donate and About this App.
There are 5 links on the Administration page; Manage Bookshelves, Manage Field Visibility, Export Books, Import Books, and Automatically Update Fields and Thumbnails.
You can add/edit/delete the list of bookshelves from the Manage Bookshelves page. The “Add” button is from the menu, click on the bookshelf title to edit or long click on the title to delete.
As more and more people have requested fields it the screen became full of fields that many people weren’t using. Unchecking a field allows you to hide it from the list and edit screen. This also includes the cover thumbnail.
You can export your complete collection to a csv file on the sdcard. This will create a file called bookCatalogue/export.csv which can be loaded and manipulated in excel. The thumbnails are stored in the same location.
If you have modified the bookCatalogue/export.csv file, you can load it back into the database, however you must ensure that the sdcard is mounted in your phone (unmounted on the computer).
Be warned: If the id in the import file is the same as an existing id, importing data will update existing book records with new information. This is usually fine if you changed a field in an exported file. If you created a new book record, ensure the id field is blank.
This will search the internet for thumbnails of any of your books as well as attempting to populate certain empty fields (such as genre and description). You can search for thumbnails for all books, or only books without a current thumbnail. Be warned: this function can take a long time.
If you like this app, it would be great if you could donate to support me, the developer. This page links to my amazon wishlist as well as my paypal donate page.
Being in Australia means I cannot publish a paid version.
This screen will show you the current version of the Book Catalogue you are running as well as links to the app homepage, source code and my email address.