Bruji

Though I live in the US and purchase most of my books with American currency, my book collection (> 5K volumes) includes many books purchased overseas or from vendors overseas, which are priced in other currencies. I've found Bookpedia (5.4.2) generally to be the best solution for cataloging my collection – and I've tried just about every other such application for Mac OS – but where it badly stumbles for me is its inability to handle more than one currency in tracking the purchase price of books. The current "Value" calculation is of little use to me, as it conflates all currencies. I don't need anything so complex as real-time currency conversion (someone on this forum requested that a few years ago), but a simple tracking of "Value" in different denominations, something other book cataloging apps can handle, would be a big help and not too tricky to implement, I believe.

I think a good way to do this would be to have a preference setting for a default currency, to which all entries in the "Price" field would default. Thus, a book that costs $29.95 could be entered as "29.95" and when the record is updated, "$" would be appended to the field = "$29.95". But when the field is filled with a different currency abbreviation, that would override the auto-appending of the default abbreviation, for example, "€29.95" When "Value" is calculated, Bookpedia could tally the subtotals for the different denominations, something like: "Value: $50,500 + €15,500 + £500". The user can, if she wishes figure out what all that adds up to in her currency of choice.

Thank you for choosing Bookpedia after testing several competitors and more importantly for the feedback where Bookpedia is lacking and can do with tracking the currencies separately.

I have added the feature request into our to do list. There is already custom code going on to handle the cents correctly and the sorting. But it's done on per item basis, tallying the total in several currencies is more complex but can be done. Mainly due to the varying ways users tag currency in a free form field.

In the meantime, you can get some value by adding totals per currency with the use of smart collections based on the currency symbol. "Price contains $", "Price contains £" and "Price contains €". I understand it will be of no use when yo want the total value of all boys bought this year, but might give you an overall view of the library value correctly.