App of the week: MyBookDroid

The App: MyBookDroid, http://market.android.com/details?id=org.zezula.bookdiary

The Good: MyBookDroid is an app devoted to organizing and categorizing the titles of books. Which might not seem very important, but in a family of voracious readers like mine, it answers the question we ask at least once every time we shop for books: "This looks cool, do we have it already?" You can scan books into the system (or check them against the books already there) by using the phone's camera to scan the barcodes on the back, or you can search for them by title, keywords, or ISBN number. Should you come across a really old book that isn't listed, you can make a custom entry.

Once the books are in the app, you can sort them by all sorts of useful categories like "Read", "To read", "Want to own", and more. You can also group them into "shelves", which are basically custom categories. I have a shelf for books specifically belonging to my brother, a shelf for books belonging to me, a shelf for nonfiction that doesn't specifically belong to either of us, and a shelf for fiction that doesn't specifically belong to us, either. Inside the app you can choose to view only books that belong to a certain category.

It runs quite nicely on my Droid 2; I've never had it freeze up or force close.

The Bad: The barcode scanner works poorly in low-light conditions; works fine in the bookstore, but not so well in the dark recesses of my bedroom in the evening. The barcode scanner also sometimes fails to read an ISBN (Puffin Books and their imprints are particularly problematic for me), although it will look up the ISBN from the copyright page just fine. To sort by shelves, you have to go through a different process than to sort by the built-in labels. It's not a big deal, it was just a little confusing the first time I started the app.

The Bottom Line: Very useful for readers who have more books than they can remember the titles of. Sometimes you will have to type in an ISBN rather than scanning it, which is a pain, but other than that it works well.