Ongoing Strategies

As you become more and more familiar with Readerware you will doubtless develop your own ways of using it and strategies for keeping your Readerware database up to date. To get you started here are some key strategies that we have found useful.

Online Ordering

There are many ways you can use Readerware for secure online ordering. I find The Readerware Shopping Cart provides the easiest way to order and track your purchases from any of the online vendors.
 

Want Lists

The Readerware Shopping Cart also provides a great way to build your want lists. But here is another approach. If you have a title that you are looking for you can add it to your database. You can keep track of your want list a number of ways. The easiest is probably to create a Rating of "Wanted" or some similar term and then select that rating for all titles on your want list. You can then select all your want list titles using a Ratings search and even print them out in any of the Readerware report formats, or publish then on your web page. You can also set Copies to 0, to indicate a wanted title. Again you can easily search on 0 copies.
 

Bookstore Cheat Sheet

Online retailers are great, but I still love searching for finds at my local used book stores. Any other fans of The San Francisco Mystery Bookstore out there? Readerware has a powerful built in reporting facility. You can print the results of a search in a number of different formats. You can create an especially useful report for taking on your trips to your local bookstores. Of course you can also use Readerware for the Palm Pilot for this too.

Create a table view with just a few column, the ones you need like author, title, format, first edition etc. Keep the columns as narrow as possible. When printing this report, select a small font, say an 8 point font. Check the Two Sided and Break on Author options. Adjust the Tables on Page slider to meet your  preferences, the goal is to get as many columns as possible on the page. Try experimenting with portrait and landscape modes. This will list the maximum number of titles per page. Depending on the font size you select you can get well over a hundred titles on a single page, sorted by author.

Remember that you can print the results of any search, so you can print multiple reports. If you are using a want list as described above you can easily print that out. You can also print out a report of your entire library. You may be surprised at how few pages it takes to print out your entire library. The report can include key information such as the format you have, signed, first edition etc. So when on a shopping trip and you come across a first edition of a favorite title in excellent condition, you can easily tell if you have it, if you only have a paperback edition etc. All the information you need to make a purchase decision at your fingertips.
 

Your Strategies

So how are you using Readerware? What are your favorite strategies. Please let us know, this will help us improve the product and we can pass your tips along to others. Please send e-mail to feedback@readerware.com.

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