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I'm going to throw my $0.02 in for LibraryThing. They use more than just Amazon.com to pull the information from, including many national and university libraries (though with accessible records, that is). So if you're cataloging non-US books it's of great use. Plus, you can input your own covers (which helps me since so many of my books are pretty old and have been reprinted two zillion times already).

I also use Library Thing. It's easy to use, you can add somrthing called Tags to make locating and organizing your books easier. Libary Thing is cheap, it can be either public or private. There are people using Library Thing that have over 8,000 books catalogued. http://www.librarything.com/

I would recommend Library Thing. I've only 300 books and I'm using it. With LibrayThing you will have social newtworking features like know people who has the same books as you have. See the reviews and discover related titles.

Take a look. For more than 200 books you have to pay $10 annual ou $25 lifetime. For less than 200 it's free. And you don't have to manage any home system.

Canoramix

A second on LibraryThing. Having written some custom bibliographic software for myself before, I'm with Homer Simpson on this one: "Let somebody else do it."

JA

Additonally- you can "tag" books on Librarything- which I am using to play around with how I might want to organize my collection before I start hauling boxes of books around my apartment. It is also helping me purge books I have inherited but have never and will never read. It has a robust database to pull information from, not just Amazon, a large number of libraries (including the Library of Congress. If you decide you want to go with library classification, many books have that information attached. I have "found" the data in Librarything for some odd, old and obscure books.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/Selkie

The downside? Finiding books in other people's libraries that I covet. My book wishlist has increased tenfold!

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned LibraryThing yet.

As others have already mentioned, no software is going to actually organize your books for you - that takes actual moving of physical books around in the real world. But LibraryThing is the hottest thing going right now for keeping track of your books. It has all the latest Web 2.0 buzzwords.

As for MySQL, you're thinking on entirely the wrong level of abstraction. Talking about MySQL is like saying "So, I want to build an airplane. I'm thinking of using aluminum."

For a couple months now I've been using http://librarything.com/, which is evolving into an incredibly powerful, flexible cataloging tool. It's not desktop based, and that turns out to be a blessing, because I can access it anywhere -- including from the public library -- to see if I own a particular edition of a particular book, or what other Thingamabrarians have said about it.

the social/community aspect of LibraryThing is addictive, in that you can find people with similar tastes and go through their catalogs. I've discovered a lot of new authors and books this way, and struck up some interesting discussions.

But for me personally, the biggest attraction of LibraryThing is the fact that Tim takes the library science end of things very seriously. Amazon is one -- but not the only and certainly not the best -- source of cataloging information. I can add a book to my library by querying one of more than thirty libraries in the U.S. and overseas -- including the Library of Congress. I can also query Amazon (US, England, Germany, wherever), but adding through the Library of Congress provides much more complete and reliable data, including the MARC record. I've got 2,500 books in my LibraryThing library, and I've experimented a lot with the system. The ability to target high quality cataloging data is not matched by any other program I've looked at.

The bottom line: a cataloging system that is dependent on Amazon alone is one that is going to be full of errors.

Finally, there is a good community of people really interested in the various social, technical and computing aspects of LibraryThing, and new features are often added as a result of input we provide to Tim and his coworkers.

Really, I don't know why anybody would bother with any other program.

I use LibraryThing alot. I have indexed almost all of the books in my apartment through it. Give it a try, the subscriptions are pretty cheap and you can have up to 100 books I think for free to try it out. When adding books you can search a ton of different libraries, including Amazon.com or the localized versions. When searching Amazon it will pull in all the information including the book cover picture.

You can import text files if you have your library in some format already, or export the data once you catalog all your books.

It also has a social tagging aspect, and the ability to share your library or keep it private.

I am in no way affiliated with LibraryThing, just a fan.

LibraryThing lets you catalog your books online and compare your list with other peoples'. It's free for collections of less than 200 books, and is otherwise $10/year or $25 for lifetime registration--

http://www.librarything.com/

I highly reccomend Library Thing http://www.librarything.com/index.php. It lets you lookup by isbn and effectivley copy catalog. After that it is a pretty straightforward matter to just print out a list and put them in order.

LibraryThing. Closed source (so far), but totally worth the $25 lifetime fee. Also compatible with a barcode scanner. I scanned my entire library (1300 books) in about five hours.

http://www.koha.org// You can run it on linux or window. It is worth a play if you have the time, runs on mysql, apache and perl. I use it at home and have used the z3950 interface to copy catalogue from the library of Congres, etc. For a normal person I think http://www.librarything.com// is the go.

http://www.librarything.com/

Does it all, I do believe.

librarything.com is a service that helped me organize my books. Of course, the bulk of the work is in actually alphabetizing them.

Appearently this is a problem a lot of people have been thinking about of late.

Checkout:
Library Thing - Catalog your books online
Listal - Social media cataloging

Both have tags, social aspects, cool entry, etc, etc.

Here is the link: http://www.librarything.com/. This will help you with the cataloging of the books. As far as organizing, hrmmm, why not organize by color - that's how some women I know would do it :D