Re: [emacs-humanities] Emacs as a library manager

[Luis Henriques]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2021 at 01:26:35AM +0100, Joost Kremers wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Feb 03 2021, Luis Henriques wrote:
> > Hopefully this isn't really too off-topic for the mailing-list.  Here it
> > goes anyway:
> 
> Seems like the sort of question that this list was created for. :-)
> 
> > For a long time now I've been in the quest for a perfect solution for
> > managing my (physical) books.  Basically, I want to keep track of the
> > basic metadata associated with a book (title, subtitle, author, genre,
> > publisher, etc).  I don't care about reading notes, as I want to keep
> > those separately.
> 
> [...]
> 
> > I would love to move to some orgmode-based solution but couldn't never
> > come up with a good idea on how to store the information.  Is there anyone
> > using orgmode for this sort of things?  Can you share your experience?
> 
> You could perhaps keep your collection as a `.bib` file (or several `.bib`
> files). There are a number of tools for working with `.bib` files in Emacs, 
> (one
> of which a package by yours truly, so I'm not entirely impartial here. ;-).
> 
> Of course, `.bib` files and the tools to work with them are more geared toward
> reference management, so it depends a bit on what your goals are if they could
> be of use, but for keeping tracks of a book collection, Ebib (my package) may 
> be
> an option. (It can actually link entries to external notes and you can also 
> use
> it to keep track of a reading list. Plus, I'm always open to feature requests.
> ;-)
> 
> Anyway, I just thought I'd mention it, in case you hadn't considered the 
> `.bib`
> format as an option yet.

Aha!  Thanks for the suggestion, Joost.

In fact, I remember some time ago considering using bibtex for this, but I
ended up not even trying it because, as you mentioned, tools are usually
targeting reference management.  Also, as far as I remember, the format
was not very flexible, but I may be wrong.  For example, I want a custom
field that allow me to store the purchase date, or another one that says
whether I have read or not that book (yeah, memory is volatile).

After a quick look at your Ebib (which looks great, by the way!), it seems
that it could indeed tick all my boxes.  And the manual even mentions the
biblatex (as opposed to bibtex) -- I'll need to read carefully this
"biblatex vs bibtex" section so that I can pick the right flavour before
starting migrating my data.

Anyway, using .bib  seems to be a very good suggestion (the best one I got
in this thread so far!).  Again, thanks and I'll definitely give Ebib a
try.

Cheers,
--
Luís