Bruji

I use Bookpedia for a collection of about 500 books, mostly on technical topics. I'd like to figure out how to organize our library by topic (probably about 5 topics) and within topic by author.

The problem is that when we add a new book, it usually gets a "Genre" assigned by Amazon (or however it can get looked up), but they're very nonuniform. For instance, there are currently Genres called "Computer Programming", "Computers & Internet", "Programming", and "Software Development".

Is there a way to tell the application that we have a pre-determined, fixed set of 5 Genres (or Locations?) into which we'll group all our books, and whenever a new book is added, it will make us choose from that fixed list? Or perhaps some other solution I haven't thought of (e.g. mapping to LOC Subject Area [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of ... sification ])?

Thanks.

Hmm, maybe there's not a whole lot of traffic on this board.

-Ken

Hi Ken,

Organizing your library is often a very personal undertaking because everyone has a different mindset of how they want to find their books again: by author, genre or subject and then location, etc.

In your case, you will unfortunately have to assign the genre yourself but the genre field has an autofill option which means you can set the list to contain only those 5 genres you want and then when you add a new book, select the genre field and start typing the genre you'd like to assign. The program will automatically guess at it from the autofill list. (You'll find the autofill list in the Preferences/Autofill.)
Another option would be turn off the genre field altogether (again in the Preferences, under Fields just uncheck the box next to 'Genre') and use one of the custom fields instead so you can be sure that there's no information added from Amazon that you're not interested in. The custom fields are all autofill fields as well. To change the title of the custom fields, go back into the Preferences and into the General tab.

Furthermore, Bookpedia can be sorted up to 6 columns deep so if you want to sort your collection by Topic (i.e. your new custom field) and then by author, you'd sort the author column first and then topic.