Organize Books, Games, DVDs and CDs with Libra

I bought a lot of games, DVDs and CDs in the last 25 years and have a rather large collection at home. I also lend media to friends and sometimes forgot about it for a couple of months or even years until my friends bring the media back to me suddenly. Using a software to organize all my books, games, CDs and DVDs was never a top priority in my life because it would literally take ages to add all of my items to the software's database.

With more than 2000 books and hundreds of CDs and DVDs it would just be a pretty boring process and I don't want to waste that much time. Libra could be a solution for me. It is a free software that organizes collections offering several features that make it stick out of the bulk of comparable products.

The first is a unique one that I never heard about before. It can use a webcam to scan a barcode and identify the item by itself. No more typing and searching through the results to find the item that you bought. This is really useful provided that the majority of items you own have barcodes and the software can identify them properly.

Libra supports other search options besides keyword searches, those are: UPC, ISBN, EAN and Jan in case the barcode reader can't be used or the item does not have a barcode which is the case for many of my books that I own.

Libra currently searches six Amazon databases which should be fine for most Books, Games, CDs and DVDs but could pose problems for older items. The search itself is very fast and displays covers as well as information about the item. All items are shown as if they were lying on a bookshelf which is also how they are displayed in your collection.

Several other features include a way to keep track of borrowed items, print options, create web pages with your collection, import possibilities for existing collections and xml support.

Update: The program homepage is no longer available, which also means that you can't download the program anymore from a first part site.  We have uploaded the latest available version of Libra to our own servers. You can download it from the following link: (Download Removed)

Please note that the program can't retrieve product information automatically from Amazon anymore which means that you can only use it to add items manually.

You may want to check out alternatives such as Data Crow or myCollections instead.

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