After struggling along with a locally hosted ecommerce installation, my PHP skills (which are entirely self taught) finally gave way to the pressures of effective branding and convenient management. The Store makes use of the BigCartel framework. I came across this fantastic service through Nicholas Felton’s ecommerce site.

Because I’m using BigCartel’s system, the products will unfortunately be listed in Dollar amounts. Payments will be made through the ever-useful PayPal system, which I feel is an ideal solution for making internet payments and keeping track of one’s different credit card accounts. Unfortunately, as far as I know, transferring money is not yet available for South African members.

As you can tell from the images above, the first product to be launched in the cmyplayStore is the Transparent version of the PacMat drinks coaster. I’m currently working out the kinks with the packaging. I’ll be posting more about that later this week.

The newer edition trades in the three-coloured, seemingly hand-stitched, typographically flourished and ligatured form for a four-coloured, reflective silver- inked, fold-out poster one. The 2008 report comes in two versions, a folded book version and an unfolded poster version. The different versions differ only in their format (and shipping delivery), the content remains the same. Each item is hand numbered and signed by Nicholas Felton. This year’s run has increased from last years by a thousand copies, which bodes well for self-initiated design projects.

While there are fewer double page spreads of information in this new edition, the information present seems more compact. Together with this, the inclusion of an eight-panelled, fold out poster assembling over a dozen different maps together makes up for the deficit. The maps were so well integrated that I nearly believed that San Francisco and Oakland were island cities like Manhattan. The stylistic changes to the typography, layout and imagery all serve to increase the effectiveness infographic’s communication. I certainly have half a mind to frame the poster and order another copy for viewing purposes.

I’ve had little previous experience with database software. And after reading about an iPhone application that catalogues things that one may lend out to a friend, I thought it high time to start taking stock of my current literary situation. One of the more useful features of the application was that it can automatically send an sms’s to a friend, notifying them of the impending deadline for the return of the borrowed item.

After looking around a bit on Versiontracker, I came across an application for the Mac called Bookpedia. I downloaded the installer and tested out the app. Immediately after launching Bookpedia, I was struck by the familiarity of the interface. It looks like a version of iTunes for printed material, right down to the bar across the bottom of the application window showing the amount of books in the Library, how many of them are either on your wishlist or are currently being lent out, and the total number of pages in the Library. There is even a coverflow view mode.

Adding books to a library is as close to seamless as one can hope: select the Add a New Book option, enter the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for a particular book and the program automatically searches various book databases (from Amazon to the University of Sydney) to assemble not only the title, author and publication details, but it conveniently downloads the book cover as well. A new Library can be set up in much the same way as new Playlists, and you can rate the different titles (1-5 stars). Fortunately being a Mac based app, Bookpedia integrates ISBN scanning features by making use of the iSight camera built in to most current Macintosh computers.

I fired up the iSight feature on my iMac, but I had some serious trouble actually scanning anything. I tested another application that provides a barcode scanning feature, and it also had trouble on the iMac. I decided to try the feature on a MacBook, and it worked straight off – indicating either a problem with my iMac’s iSight or difficulty the feature has with iMac iSights in general. On the preview screen, an array of horizontal red lines provides you with a guideline of where the barcode should be held. The lines turn green and a chime indicates that the barcode was successfully scanned. While this feature is not entirely perfect, it is a very welcome one nonetheless.

Throughout the course of my cataloguing, I found that the covers for a number of my titles were different from that provided by the book databases. Editing an entry is as easy as double-clicking the library listing for the title, and in my case correcting the cover art entailed scanning the book cover (I couldn’t find my particular one on the internet), and dragging it into the Cover Art window.

Because of the time I’ve spent working at a bookshop, I’ve become rather reverent of my own books. So in the event that I actually end up lending a book out, I will most certainly be making use of the Borrowed tracking features. As with the iPhone app mentioned at the beginning of this post, there is a convenient emailing facility that allows you to send a friendly reminder of the outstanding item, come deadline.

Once your cataloguing is complete, the information can be exported in a number of ways. It can be archived, backed-up, shared on MobileMe, uploaded to a website or even added to an iPod as a collection of notes.

The Statistics feature piqued my interest, considering my affinity for infographics. This feature arranges the catalogue into a number of different data sets represented by bar graphs. My initial reaction was “Who is Alan Martin and why do I have six of his books?” It didn’t take long to find out that it was the copies – and duplicates  - of Tank Girl that he wrote with Jamie Hewlett. This brings me to the only gripe I have with Statistics, the display is only as good as the data it represents: while Martin is rightly credited as the writer of the work, I feel that Hewlett holds more weight as the titles’ author; different databases categorise their items in slightly varied ways (of the publishers in the top 10 in my collection, Penguin appears five times). This all reminds me of a lecture by Hans Rosling about the problems concerning data.

The great thing about Bookpedia is that Bruji have developed applications that mirror these useful features for not only CD’s and DVD’s, but for Games as well. And once all of those collections have been catalogued, keeping track of your Borrowed items and your various Wishlists becomes even more convenient with the advent of Pocketpedia for the iPhone/iPod Touch.