Organize, collect, share your books with Singlefile

I might have to try this out. If they can output the info to a text file or spreadsheet or something, that would also be cool. Has anyone tried this?

1. It's $20/year for something you could program into your own database. (Heck, you've got access to database software through Hostmatters -- that would take care of the portability question.)

Indeed, you can probably find some good freeware or shareware packages out there that can do this, too. Or, for that matter, something that will sync the database between your PC and your Palm, so you always have it with you.

2. I know, to a moral certainty, that as soon as I did it, the firm would go out of business. Boom.

Yeah, you can export it, but, still ...

3. Do you really need to know how many paperback non-fiction business books you have between 201-300 pages?

Very nifty in concept, but I just don't trust it.

The one thing that I really liked about it was that all you had to do was enter the ISBN or IBSN or whatever number, and all the key stats on the book dropped in. I could write up (and fill out) a database, but not pre-populated in that manner.

Use Readerware instead. Has a Palm plug-in, too.

I have tried it and found it great. Plus, they have a plug-in that lets you scan in the ISBNs using the free CueCat scanner. :)

Dave said: Very nifty in concept, but I just don't trust it.

I'm here to answer your questions. What don't you trust? And don't worry about us going out of business -- we've been in biz since 1995.

-Jason Fried
Spinfree, Singlefile, and 37signals

bears-cave.com -- your home for customer relations.

1995. Geez, that's forever in Internet time. :-)

My mistrust is not a "they're all a bunch of frauds" mistrust, or a "this service seems unreliable," but more a matter of being willing to invest the time and effort to collect this data to store someplace that, ultimately, isn't mine. While seven years is a good track record, there's nothing to say that tomorrow Singlefile couldn't go bankrupt or, more likely, be bought up by someone else who would either shut it down, bump up the price, sell the data to Microsoft, or otherwise make it much less of a deal.

Of course, I could still extract the data down. So maybe I'm just being commercially paranoid. The benefits just don't make it worth the worries plus the costs to me.