One of the more frustrating losses when I ditched my last Windows box was the ability to run a  program called HomeBase (http://www.abebooks.com/docs/homebase/).  HomeBase is designed for online booksellers.  The user can scan a bar code and have scraped information automatically populated into database fields (sound familiar?)  Then one can export it to various formats, including the crucial UIEE, which is what I use.

This may be beyond your intended scope, but Tellico is almost there.  It just needs a few custom fields (which can of course be added by the end user) and, crucially, an exporter to UIEE format.

I could write and test such an exporter in about an hour if Tellico were written in Perl, but I don't speak python (that's what it's written in, right?)  I'm not oppposed to writing it myself, but there would be a learning curve as I learned the new language.  At present, I have a Perl script written that converts from one of Tellico's output formats (I forget which one I chose) to UIEE as an external utility.  But a native exporter would be great.  The ability to ftp changed entries to a server and delete or archive entries based on a downloa ded file of purchased books (in the same UIEE format) would be stellar.  The ability to scrape one or more used book aggregators to find a range of asking prices for that ISBN and populate one's "Asking Price" field with the low, high, median, or mean values from that scrape would be, er, more than stellar (galactic?)

For the former, as somewhat of a hack, you could pre-associate named fields with output fields (stuff like "purchaseprice" and "askingprice"), as happened when I provided the LoC sort code, and just require the user to follow that naming convention.

HomeBase does start up in wine, but cannot do anything very useful: you can, however, see the fields required

(I will feel foolish if I've already asked this.)

- Joshua McGee
http://www.mcgees.org