When you have more than 4000 books scattered around the house, it gets difficult to find the one you’re looking for. Especially if you’re hunting for a short story and you can’t quite remember which book you read it in. This used to happen a lot, chez Oikofuge. But not any more.

Book Collector is a book cataloguing program from Collectorz.com, and it’s the best I’ve run into. I can’t now imagine life without it.

Data entry is easy, and highly automated. If your book has an ISBN, you can type it in or scan it with a barcode reader, and the basic book data are pulled down off the Collectorz.com central database. These days, the ISBN is readily visible on the back cover, but with older books (1967 to the mid-70s) you may have to look for numbers written on the spine, or listed in the front matter. Some UK publications of that vintage have nine-digit SBNs instead of ten-digit ISBNs, but the conversion is easy—just add a zero at the left end.

Before 1967, there were no ISBNs, but Book Collector also lets you add books automatically by entering the author and title. This option will bring up all matching entries in the Collectorz.com database, so you might need to do a little poking around to find the entry that matches your specific edition.

That will get the basic data into your database, including a version of the cover art if it’s available. But the software offers a huge number of additional relevant data-fields, which you can fill in or ignore according to your wishes. (You’ll probably want to make use of the “book location” field, unless you have a memory much better than mine.) It even lets you create custom fields.

The on-line cover art comes from a variety of sources—it varies in size and quality, and can occasionally be for the wrong edition of your book. But Book Collector has an automated search facility that lets you look for more cover art on-line. It also lets you add your own art by scanning the cover. If you’re of an obsessive nature (who, me?) you may find yourself scanning a lot of book covers to get precisely the right edition.

You can view your database in various ways, usually splitting the view between some sort of overview of the books, and a detailed view of a specific volume. The overviews available are a “bookshelf” depiction of cover art (which I find useful when browsing for a specific book) and a spreadsheet-type display of multiple customizable columns. There’s also a “cover flow” option available, but the less said about that the better—it’s the sort of triumph of style over utility that could only appeal to an Apple user.

You can choose from a growing number of different formats for viewing your book details; or, with a little knowledge of HTML/ XML, and some digging around in the file structure, you can customize up your own view.

Searching is easy. There’s a quick-and-dirty search option that just looks for your chosen text anywhere in the book’s description. It’ll bring up false hits, but often it lets you narrow down the display enough to zero in visually on the book you want. But you can also create moderately sophisticated “filter” views, using simple Boolean logic functions, to pull out the books you want.

As someone who has a lot of short stories in my book collection, I particularly value the fact that I can enter a contents list for my books. Book Collector offers you a cut-down database and user-defined fields for each short story in a book. Unfortunately, the contents list won’t come down to you automatically from Collectorz.com—manual entry is required, which can be tedious if you have a lot of “complete works” volumes on your shelves. And I would appreciate it if Book Collector some day offered a detailed view by short story as well as by book. But that’s a minor niggle when I can choose to display anything I want in the columns of the spreadsheet view.

What else? Collectorz.com offers a cloud storage facility, so you can be sure you have the same data on all your devices. There’s a responsive Support team (I’ve only ever had to use them once) and an active users’ forum where people are happy to help out with minor queries. And there’s a free try-before-you-buy download.

If you’re in the market for book cataloguing software, do give it go.