We have way too many books in our house. I have many plastic containers in the basement full of them, plenty of bookshelves, and piles of them everywhere. My wife and I both have years of being students; too many years of reading. Sitting in the living room right now I can see at least forty books piled around. Books on manhole covers, Roman history, product strategy for high tech companies, a collection of poems, on political targeting, on movies, on how to play go, a mystery, on Gauguin, on clay figures, and a stack of kids' books. 

I have resolved to reduce the ranks. In my mind, only the most loved should remain. At least half have to go. I am not sure whether to give the others to a library, donate them to a non-profit, share them with co-workers, or what. And I am sure that my wife has at least twice as many books as I do. I will have to leave them to her. 

You might think that the proper strategy would be to simply box up the books that can go. Not so. Too easy.

Instead, I decided to make a database of all my books, sort them into categories, rank them, and then act with full information about which to keep and which to hold.

I found a cool (and free) program this weekend to manage the process. It is called eLibPro at you can find it here. The nice thing about the program is that you can enter only the ten-digit ISBN number of the book and it pulls in the full record, often including a picture of the cover, over the Internet from Amazon.com. For older books, the program can search online by author or title, or you just have to enter some old ones manually. I was able to put in about 180 books pretty quickly on Saturday, but I have a lot more to go. Tip for users of that program—use Microsoft Access directly on the data for database operations.

For the skeptics, having anything in a database provides value. Once the books are all in a computerized list, they can be quickly searched. And you can track who borrows them.

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