I couldn't have possibly reached up to a higher apex of geekdom, than I did last week. The K2 of Klingon; the Everest of EverQuest; the Star Wars of Star Warses. What is this brilliant north star in my big dipper of nerding out?
Booxter.
What exactly is booxter? It's a software program for cataloguing, organizing, and managing personal or public libraries. Meaning, you sit at home for a week and type in the information for your books in your bookshelf. Is this so you can read your books anytime on your computer? No. In fact, you can't really do anything with the program besides have a record of what books you own or have read.
I mean, it's got a few more features than that; you can create genres in any way you want, you can keep records of whether or not your books are signed, lent out to friends, and keep detailed notes on them without writing in the book. You have the ability to keep track of the money spent on the books as well as their current cumulative worth.
The way it works is this- you can manually type in the information from the copyright page, or if you're connected to the internet, type in the ISBN number and Booxter will search the library of congress for you. Pretty sweet. But it doesn't have to stop there- if you've created a book, or have a bunch of magazines and literary journals, you can manually input all their information as well.
But what does this mean for my pocket protectin' computer programmin' dungeons and dragons playin' future as the nerdiest man alive? I'm not sure. It does say a lot for my book obsession, something that I have written about before at length.
On one hand, I'm spending this week cataloguing my books, if only so that I can tell people what books I have regardless of having my library at my finger tips. It's %50 like iTunes because I can organize my books in whatever way I feel like but I can't access my books on my computer. It's ALMOST useless, but that fact alone is the reason it is a nerdy endeavor.
Why? The answer is always "Why not?"
Why do you program a videogame about drug dealing to work on your monochromatic graphic calculator? Why do we care about what color or size or capacity our iPod has? Why do you a website allowing friends to interact over the computer without ever speaking over the phone or communicating in person?
Why do I want to program my books into my computer? It's the same reason we want to use computers to do everything? It further increases the usability of my computer, creating another layered task to accomplish and categorize. There's a program that does the same thing for DVDs and although I could surely be considered a movie geek, this clearly locks me into my role (model) as a book nerd.
Booxter gives me the kind of reassurance that I can sit at home and inventory, categorize, and appraise the value of my personal library, all while someone sits at home developing the software for me to do so.
And it's just going to get better and better and better and SkyNet. I, Jeff Crocker, will welcome our robot overlords and bow before their cold, emotionless, tyrannical rule. Besides, they're going to need nerds to teach them Klingon.
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