"All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind."
Khalil Gibran

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

BooksApp2-Organize your home or class library







 
Today I discovered a cell phone Application that I am really excited about!

The APP is called BooksApp2

As many of you know, I am a Homeschooling Parent, but this App would be good for Homeschoolers, Book Lovers, Parents of small children, or for those Organizational Gurus that like to organize their lives wherever possible!

I cannot count the number of times that I've either:
  • Forgotten who I've lent my books to and never gotten them back.
  • Wondered if I had a book already (or an extra one to give away...because I do that.)   You know, that moment when you are at the store, looking at a book, and wondering if you've bought it already.
  • Can't remember if I've read a book.  Oh, you know how it goes....you buy lots of books thinking you'll read them all right away.  Some of them you do, and some of them....well.....they may sit a while.  Especially if I really like a particular Author, I sometimes get confused regarding which books I've read and which I bought but haven't read yet.

The good news is that this App can fix all these issues for me!  

Here is the Description from Google Play's website regarding this App:

Description

BooksApp helps you organize your home library effortlessly. Scan the barcode of a book and all its information is downloaded from the web and saved to your phone automatically¹. You can then easily keep track of your books.
To lend a book to someone, scan it (or open it from the list), press "Lend book" and select your friend. When a month has passed, you will get a notification to remind you where the book is. If you have a book you want to recommend to a friend, you can do that over SMS, e-mail or Facebook etc.

You can organize your books into collections, e.g. "Favorites", "Reading now" or whatever tickles your fancy.

Finding more books is trivial. You can search for books by the same author or publisher, or books dealing with the same subject, all without typing a single character. Saving any of the matches to your phone is just one tap away.

You can export books in two ways, either as a spreadsheet—which you can send to anyone—or to Google Docs². The spreadsheet is a CSV (Comma-separated values) file that you can open in any spreadsheet program. You can also send the file to other BooksApp users, both Android and iPhone users.

Importing books is done by opening a CSV file from an e-mail or from the file manager.
BooksApp exists for iPhone as well, see www.books-app.com for more information.
Happy book organization! :-)

BooksApp is open source and released under the Apache 2.0 License https://github.com/jonasb/BooksApp


¹) Should the book not exist amongst Google Books vast amounts of books, you can always enter it manually.

²) Google Docs export requires Android 2.1 or later.



Here are 2 links to the FREE App:


For Android Phones (FREE)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wigwamlabs.booksapp&hl=en

For iPhone (FREE)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/booksapp-2/id369366304?mt=8


I hope that this is as exciting to you as it was to me.  If you have kids that are old enough that you trust them with your smart phone, I bet you can recruit them to scan your books!  It is sort of fun and they can play 'Book Store'. 

Here are some Screen Shots (copied from the Google Play webpage)


*POSSIBLE ISSUE & WORK AROUND*

I use AT&T as my cell phone provider and today when I went on my phone to 'Google Play' and searched BooksApp2, nothing came up.  My work around was to go to Google Play on my home computer, plug my cell phone into my computer via the USB plug, and I downloaded it from the computer directly to the cell phone.  It took just a couple minutes and works perfect!

1 comment:

  1. Hi, my name is Jackie and I found your blog on the Let's Homeschool High School Blog Roll. I wanted to stop by and wish you a happy New Year and to invite you to link up with our Let's Homeschool High School January Blog Hop.

    Here is the link: http://letshomeschoolhighschool.com/blog/2014/01/01/homeschool-high-school-january-2014-blog-hop/#comment-19178

    If you have any questions, please let me know. I look forward to having you join us! :)

    Joyfully,
    Jackie
    Let's Homeschool High School Admn.

    ReplyDelete

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