The Home Library Problem Solved

Zack Grossbart writes "About 18 months ago I posted the following question to Ask Slashdot: 'How do you organize a home library with 3,500 books?' I have read all the responses, reviewed most of the available software, and come up with a good solution described in the article The Library Problem. This article discusses various cataloging schemes, reviews cheap barcode scanners, and outlines a complete solution for organizing your home library. Now you can see an Ask Slashdot question with a definitive answer."

Comments

Library problem unsolved: Add kids

[EmbeddedJanitor]

...they'll scramble the system if it does not make sense to them.

We have approx 3000 books in the house as well as two kids. Dewey-ish classification works fine for us, splitting the books into groups according to their Dewey hundreds (0-99.999, 100-1999.999,...). However we have had to break out some special sections. Robots, programming and electronics have a special area together (breaking Dewey boundaries). All the fishing related stuff goes together (including studies of aquatic instects etc). All the craft books go together (well Dewey does that anyway).

No computer needed.

Our system

[tool462]

We are only around 500-600 books right now, so admittedly it's a smaller issue than 3500, but Delicious Library software combined with what the submitter calls "soft alphabetizing" has worked well for us. We split fiction from non-fiction, then split non-fiction into sub categories. My wife and I each have a handful of categories that we are very interested in, so a dozen sub-categories combined with a general non-fiction catch-all makes most books easy to find. In fact, the only reason we use the software catalog is so we can loan out books to friends and family. What's the point of keeping hundreds or thousands of books, if they go unused? People are always borrowing books (and movies) and we don't have to worry about losing them. Or at least we know whose thumbs to break if the books don't come back.

Re:IP business model

[mi]

If the NY Times could figure out a system by which they'd know who is reading which copy of their newspaper, who is peeking over shoulders to read it and who hands it to someone else, they'd use that system to charge everyone who takes a look at their property. The only thing that's stopping them is that this is currently not feasible. The MPAA and RIAA are just lucky that their product migrated to digital format much sooner

Uhm, well, yes. Is there anything wrong with it? You don't say, that there is, but I feel, you imply it...

Because if we don't, we'll end up paying for everything every time we get in contact with it.

True, but, again, there is nothing obviously wrong with the situation... In fact, I think, this would be a considerable improvement. If the content-creator (or whoever they sell their creations to) is paid every time the creation is read/watched/listened, the system would be much better at rewarding good creations and punishing the bad ones. It is doing so already, but the technological/legal advances you are forecasting promise to make it much less crude.

In books it is especially unfair, because the author's reward is determined only by the amount of first sales. This means, a book that stays in a family for generations and one, that's thrown out after the first read, reward their authors equally and cost their readers the same... At least, with videos the authors/makers get something every time a movie is rented.