Book Crawler App Reviews

I have Bookcrawler on my iPhone, iPad, and iMac (version 1.8.1). I started cataloging my books in the last two days. My objective is to pack away technical and a some other books and get them out of my office. I need Bookcrawler so that I can tell if I even have a book and where it might be: office, box X in garage, … Bookcrawler is quirky but my process works so far. I enter data on the iPhone and export to the iPad and the iMac via Dropbox. I won’t go in the other direction yet until I have all the books, maybe 600, into Bookcrawler. So far I have 119. Some of the books go back to the early 1900s. I have given Bookcrawler five stars rather than four stars to encourage the developer to continue working on this app and the related iOS app. As a footnote, I hope to share some of my Bookcrawler library info, as csv files, with other people that are interested in acquiring technical or scientific books. As another note, I found the ISBN Scanner via iPad Pro unusable. The ISBN Scanner works most of the time on the iPhone 6. I haven’t tried scanning on the iMac.

I had an earlier version of this on an iPad, and thought it was quite good. The OSX version, however, is a great let-down. Reading in bar-codes on the iMacs built in camera is a hit and (mostly) miss business, and I find it easier to use my iPhone for this, and then load the results to Dropbox. The book search doesnt seem to function as well as with the earlier version - early ISBNs return nothing. But above all the application seems to be very unstable, and you are likely to find yourself having to enter the same books several times over unless you remember to save after every addition. I cant recommend it, and am sorry to have spent money on it.

Keep those updates coming, guys! This app has potential, and Im going to stick with it, but right now its veeerrrryyyy slow to populate fields. Its taken me twenty minutes to enter three books. The 13-digit ISBN should be all you need to pull in all the additional data yet I seem to have to enter everything by hand. Not good yet, but Im willing to be patient. I like the UI and the amount of data the app has the potential to display.

Book Crawler is goon with the IPad and I thought that the Mac version will be better (higher price). Unfortunately the IMac version is far to be as good. It is nearly impossible to use my version from Dropbox to link the two versions. It works some time and most of the time not. This version is also very slow when working. I used to modify the database with my IPad and look the results on my IMac. More work is need.

Its a shame to sell applications that are not able to work more than 30 seconds. DONT BUY IT

Thanks to the developer for creating this app for OSX. Love the app on both iPhone and iPad iOS versions and love the ability to refine my database now on my Mac. Import of my database went smoothly for the most part. My only question is that the book images only seem to load after I select each book. With approximateley 2000 books in the database so far, itll take awhile to populate the images in this manner.

Nice to finally see a MacOS version of Book Crawler; Ive been using the iOS verion on my iPhone and iPad for a while now. As version 1.0, its a good, basic program that works well with the iOS version, but I know it will continue to improve. The author is very responsive to comments and requests.

So far, the ISBN scanner has not recognized any of the 40 books that I have tried…I am guessing that has something to do with the fact that the built-in iMac camera reverses the picture. Adding another camera does not help, since the program wont open the scanner window when there is more than one camera available. I also have this program for iPhone/iPad…it occasionally works on the iPad, but the iPhone version basically does nothing.

I so like this idea, but this is cumbersome. CUMBERSOME. I can do better with a word document that lists my books and I write my ratings. Ive lost data, Ive been unable to enter info. I keep meeting one obstacle after the other. And I paid for this? More than most apps? Im done.

Precisely named. It CRAWLS. It will NOT do a series of books by author. IPad, yes. MAC, NO. I put Bradbury, Ray in. Never heard of him. Had to enter each bleeding book one by one. I have a collection of 3,000 books. Im on page 13 of 83. My Readerware is getting a bit old in the tooth and I programmed the Bento myself. I really wanted one main system. In reality, I have two functioning and one lost lamb, knackered, bucktooth and befuddled. Tonight, Im lucky if I got 10 in. The program often goes silly and freezes, often times I have to re-enter and re-enter a book by title, then author, then take the whole system down and bring it back up. This is super frustrating. Any suggestions?

I have Book Crawler on my iPad and iPhone and love it, so I was excited to see it available for the Mac. Unfortunately, this Mac version is very slow, so I usually end up opening and using the version on my iPad instead. Granted, I have a very large database (4000+ records). Synching also needs to be improved; but thats not as much an issue for me because I found its quicker to just transfer my database from my iPad via iTunes than to wait for it to synch from Dropbox. The Book Crawler app on my iPad is an indispensible app for me, so Im hoping these issues will be fixed in this Mac version of the app.

I could get none of the promised functionality (scanner, lookup, import, etc.) to work, except dialog boxes to type in data. I can do that with Numbers.

I have BookCrawler on my iPhone and iPad, and its invaluable in keeping track of the books I want to read. I was really excited to see its available for the desktop, even if cost $15. One thing Ive been dying to do is create a collection of unread books that are available through my local library. This is hard to do on the mobile versions, and it SHOULD be easy to do on the desktop version. NOT! I kept keying in the collection name and saving the file, and the app kept NOT keeping my changes. I spent an hour trying to do something that ought to be super-simple but is apparently beyond the capabilities of the desktop app. Wish I could get my $15 back. Really, really, really disappointed because I am a HUGE fan of the mobile apps -- always telling my book-loving friends to get it. I wont be recommending the desktop app anytime soon.

I purchased this app as a way to catalogue my homeschool library. I have it on both IPhone/IPad and Mac. While I know some are frustrated with the Mac version, after reading the forums and facebook postings from the developer, I believe they are committed to the success of this App and will be consistently improving this product for users. This is so easy to use and I look forward to learning more about what I can do with this. Thank you so much for creating this!

I love the app on my iPad. It is easy to enter a book, edit and find info. I just installed the desk top version because I thought it would be easier to type in the information. Why can we not enter a new book by choosing manually or google? Too many screens for editing and adding. I haven’t tried synching from my iPad. You can make a collection of books you want to read, had not thought of that before. I hope updates are made soon to make it worth the $15.

I have 1850 books in our BookCrawler database on my iPhone and iPad (so far). They have been great platforms to scan in the titles and have them handy when I am in a book store, but those small screens can be a pain to find a book or add comments. This version of BookCrawler for OS X solves that problem!!!! The combination of the OS X version (for search and data entry) with the IOS version for scanning books and having the database handy when we are in a bookstore is a perfect combination. My wife and I have already saved ourselves from re-buying a half a doen books that we forgot we had read before (or didn’t recognize since publishers change the cover artwork). The only reason I give this 4 stars instead of 5 is that syncing devices is not as seamless as iBooks or Kindle is. You still have to manually export database updates and import them on remote devices to keep them in sync.

This is a very nice complement to having Book Crawler on my iPhone. As usual Jaime has done a lovely job. It was super easy to import my iPhone backup file from dropbox. It brought in everything, including LOTS of my own book photos for my books that dont have photos in online databases. i have 2700 books, many of them old enough to predate ISBNs so I have to enter a lot of data manually; it all comes in beautifully. Shelf display is nice, and the author listing will let me easily see where I have multiple author formats for the same person so I can consolidate his or her books under one name. Thanks Jaime!

I regret updating. I have more than 500 books uploaded, and then an update happen. All of them are gone. I used to be very happy to put a new title on this app, but all my efforts are gone.

I spent all afternoon struggling with the app on my phone and iPad. About 30 books coudn’t be scanned. Then I tried uploading database to my MacBook . . .every time I get the books loaded, it doesn’t save!! Ugh. So frustrating. I’m going to ask for my money back. Such a bummer because the app is visually appealing. Too bad it doesn’t work.

I have tried to hang in there with Book Crawler, but with this last release all of my patience tokens have been redeemed and I’m going to look elsewhere. I am a long time satisfied user of BC on my iPhone and a long suffering disappointed user of BC on my Mac. BC has all the potential to be an outstanding app, but it continues to have serious problems and what few issues have been addressed since I started trying to use the Mac version have been very slllooooowwwww in coming. This is clearly a product with a single developer working on it in his spare time. Product testing is close to non-existent. In an hour’s time I could put together a list of a dozen obvious problems that should never have been in a released product. Today I fired up version 1.5 for the first time. It started with a progress bar and a message saying my database was being updated. Updated was an unusual way to describe what happened. When the “updating” was done, my database was gone. Not a single book record was available. Luckily, I have database backups on Dropbox, so I imported by latest backup. It loaded successfully, but now all of the pictures fo the book covers are gone. Nothing but grey covers with the book name in white text. I give up. I’ve spent several hours with previous versions trying to figure out repairs and workarounds for this app’s problems. I’m an old man. I can’t wait any longer. So long, and thanks for all the fish.