Coveting
I have a ton of stuff, but it's very particular stuff, mostly limited to books, CDs, and movies. And I have a ton of all three.
For years I've been thinking in the back of my head that I need to get a database started of - at the very least - all of my movies so that when I'm in a store I know if I've already got such and such on DVD. I started this all by hand (!) a million years ago, but I haven't updated in in like four years. You can see this partial list here.
I was thinking that I would use my All Consuming profile to do this, but I'm weirdly anal about things and since I've actually not seen several of the movies I own, I hate to list them there. Plus, I've recently started a Natuba page (Natuba is a service that lets you add all of your feeds to one central location. Mine's here and currently lists my posts on Vox, the images I upload to my Flickr account, the books I'm reading on All Consuming, all of my Twitters, and my Netflix Ship/Receive feed, though they don't have dates in their feeds, so the items are being posted in 1969 and not being listed as they should. I reported it to Netflix and a developer said he'd look into it) and didn't want to flood my feed with 400 or so DVDs.
I did a search last night and found Collectorz which has software specifically so you can create a database of things like books, movies, and music. The best part is that they have a barcode scanner so you don't manually have to type anything in, just scan the barcodes on the products.
Right now, they have a special Labor Day package where you can the software for books, movies, and music plus the scanner, tech support, and CD backups for $209.95.
I'm pretty sure that not having to scan all my movies or my books alone would be worth it, but I was wondering if anyone has tried this before. Was it worth the money? Am I being a sucker to spend this much money on something like this?
Update: I gave in and ordered the Labor Day package. I've never been good at self-restraint.
Comments
I used Delicious Library for a while, which catalogues books, movies, games, and CDs, with the barcode option (using my webcam).
However, I finally decided that for me, part of the fun of making a catalogue would be sharing it and comparing it to other people's collections, so I ended up joining LibraryThing, and am slowly entering my book collection (it will take some time, since I have more than 1000 books, and since I just moved they're mostly still in boxes).
I already entered a few items into each the movie, music, and books software and it's very cool. It looks like you can even export your lists into HTML files and upload them to a web server, so I'll have to do this once I get the scanning done.