I found a great piece of Mac software this weekend for cataloguing your book collection: Bookpedia by Bruji.

Whether books line every wall of your house or barely fill one shelf, Bookpedia is the perfect application to help you keep track of them. Entering the information for each book is fast and easy because the program retrieves all the information from the Internet for you.

Essentially, all you have to do is type in the ISBN number of your books (or scan them in if you have an iSight or barcode scanner), and Bookpedia pulls the information and cover image (if available) from a bunch of different online databases, including the various Amazons, AbeBooks, etc. If your books are pre-ISBN era, you can type in keywords to find them, or you can enter information manually.

The software has a great export function, for exporting your library to a spreadsheet, website, or rich text document. I’m currently using Bookpedia to keep track of books and reviews for this site and it works very well. Bruji also offers CDpedia for your music, DVDpedia for your movies, and Gamepedia for video games.

If the idea of typing ISBNs doesn’t appeal to you, and you don’t want or have an iSight camera, you can pick up a :CueCat scanner on eBay for about $10. I think the CueCat works with most of the software below, as well.