I caught a trackback a couple days ago from a rare book dealer who reviewed Tellico and Readerware. It’s a rather thorough review. I can tell he actually used Tellico and tried it out. I appreciate the nice things he had to say about it, too.

Let’s start out with Tellico. The first thing to keep in mind about this application is that it is really a labour of love, and as such is non-commercial. That said, Linux as a whole is quite similar, so this does not mean that you’re getting a second rate program just because it doesn’t cost you anything. Tellico is not just a book cataloguing application, it is useful for organising any particular collection that you might want to catalogue.

One thing he does focus on is the CSV export

Another top feature worth mentioning about Tellico is that it supports a huge range of import and export options. That said, the CSV export does not allow you to custom tailor which fields are exported and in which order.

So perhaps the CSV exporter should offer an option to limit the exported fields to those currently visible, and in the order currently shown. That wouldn’t take too much effort.

Another big downside to it is that ultimately as an application it is of little use to booksellers. While fantastic for the average collector, it is non-relational in the sense that ultimately it is a really fancy frontend to a single flat database table. You can’t store related information like supplier information, or invoicing data etc. Unless for each book you create a massive set of fields and accept that your application is a bit of a hack from a sales point of view.

He hits the nail on the head there. It’s nothing that I try to deny, Tellico started out as an experiment for me, and I don’t claim any level of complexity for it. But perhaps, someday, I can get to Tellico 2 and include some SQL and make the world a better place…