Managing your ebooks collection

I've just spend 2 hours looking for a plot that's in a book I knew I had somewhere. I went through 4 cds of ebooks, some on hdd, and finally found it in a book sitting on a shelf above the table ;-( And now I'm annoyed, to say the least.

So I was wondering - how do you manage your ebook(*) collection? I have a stackpile of technical (related to my work) books, articles, papers and whatnot. Some of them are "real" books, (OCRed, you can search through them with pdf viewers search), some of them are just scanned images in a pdf form. Some of them are my old project notes scanned from notebooks (definitely not searchable, barely readable even).

I'm looking for some way to index them in a database, so I can have an overview of what's all in there. Options which could prove to be useful would be: - get book data from the net based on ISBN - autoscanning of files for ISBN number, or some sort of "auto getting data" - clean interface - maybe an option to leave a note in the database relating to some boo. Something akin "this is useful" next to "World Domination for Dummies, 3rd edition"

So I was wondering, would you be so kind to share your ideas, maybe offer a suggestion or two, if any come to mind.

(*) No problem with regular ones - one under the piano, two under the table to keep it straight, and one to keep the lid on instant noodles

Edit by me: I should've mentioned. I'm looking for something on windows platform.

From stackoverflow

• Have you tried Delicious Library?

  ldigas : No, sorry, I should've mentioned. I'm looking for something on windows platform. Looks nice though.

• There used to be an app named Libra at http://www.getlibra.com but it looks like it is no longer functional. I had loaded quite a few book of my own into it.

  A Windows clone (or close cousin) of Delicious Library is MediaMan

  An open-source alternative might be Calibre, but I haven't tried it. Looks very interesting, though.

  The one thing I've found is these solutions don't do full-text searching of your eBooks. For that, you will need something that can search PDFs, CHMs, etc. Google Desktop Search would be the answer to that.

• For my own software library I tend to use Launchy's indexing service. It's a pretty light weight application launcher, and it does not require you to type in the exact name of a file. This is pretty handy on my PC where I have about 10GB of eBooks (I doubt I'll ever read even 5% of it). Whenever I want to read up on a certain topic I just start typing in key words and a list of matches appears in front of me :D

  ldigas : Problem is it works only if every of your book is nicely named. Lot of mine are something like 34243234243.pdf or 18032008-results.pdf, so I can't rely on the name of the file (that's why I'm searching for some kind of database).

  ZainR : ouch, in that case Google Desktop may be better for you, though it comes with significantly more overhead (that was my experience anyways). It does have full text search though

• Have you tried out Calibre. It's open source, but starting to look more professional than it did a while ago.