My Ebook Collection

What books do you have in your ebook collection?

Ever since I've been on the internet I've found myself collecting ebooks. The things flutter across my computer's hard drive like snow flakes, with every little pdf and exe saved carefully for future reading.

The problem is I soon end up with a whole bunch of files dotted around amongst other files, most of which have file names that are less than helpful.

Have I read RTS.pdf? What is it? How about Hoone_p.pdf? I must have saved it for a reason but for the life of me cannot remember even what it's about let alone if it's worth reading again or keeping. My ebook collection could perhaps best be described as "hard drive junk". That used to be the case until one day I particularly wanted to access a particular ebook and no amount of searching would find it. It was important to me as it had some detailed instructions about getting the best out of Wordpress blogs, with some real killer tips and handy stuff. Eventually I had to face the facts. I'd deleted it at some point, probably because I'd forgotten what it was.

Ebook Curse or Ebook Collection?

It's a given that some of my ebooks are junk and probably best trashed but after my lost book I decided it was time to get organized. Thinking it would be easy enough I created folders, sub folders, sub sub folders and sub sub sub folders. Soon my ebook collection would be tamed, easy to look through, from jungle to manicured garden. That was the plan.

The first snag was finding some books fitted more than one category. Should I make multiple copies? The 2nd snag was that just stuffing them in folders was like stuffing printed books into boxes, leaving me blind to what was in each box without opening it to look inside.

Neat and tidy yes, particularly useful, not really.

I had to find some way to lift the curse and make the most of my ebook collection. Some of those pdfs had cost over $50 but just hidden in some folder they were lost among all the freebies and junk.

All My Books Ebook Collection Software

One good thing came from deleting my Wordpress ebook. When I mentioned my mistake to my fellow blogger and roommate Gino he suggested All My Books and showed me the program on his computer.

Sold on the idea I downloaded the demo. I found it easy to play with but didn't get round to doing anything with it until after the demo expired. Oops! I asked to look at my friend's ebook collection again and that was finally it; I loved what it could do! Search by author? Of course, in fact the options and configurations are as detailed as you want them to be. Just like my ebooks the solution was already on my computer, half forgotten!

I resolved to spend a weekend putting my ebooks into some kind of ordered collection with it and asked Gino to help. He just grinned and said I wouldn't need help. Well he was right, in fact it took less than 2 hours to have every single book on my PC neatly categorized, labeled, searchable and most importantly converted into a useful ebook collection, rather than a bunch of dead files. You can download it from this link:

Try the demo now

Just don't forget to actually use it! You can read The Best Ebook Library Ever article as well.