What is personal magazine management software?

Magazine management software, it turns out, is exactly the kind of tool you'd want if you found yourself adrift in the murky quagmire of electronic journal databases, which is exactly the sort of situation publishers, editors, librarians, researchers and collectors tend to find themselves in with alarming frequency. It's a bit like owning a digital filing cabinet for the wild, occasionally baffling and always prolific world of magazines. By providing an effortless and efficient way to organize, track and access these digital treasures, the software is essentially the Difference Between a Hitchhiker and a Well-Organized Librarian.

The magazine database, like a towel on a strange alien planet, is packed with endless potential. It stores a dazzlingly eclectic array of information – everything from magazine titles, numbers and publication dates to genres, keywords and possibly even the cover image, which, one hopes, wasn't an avant-garde expression of magazine chaos. It can even store additional details such as annotations, ratings and comments. As if that wasn't enough, users can add their own custom tags or metadata to classify their magazines according to their wildly specific whims. Want to tag an entire collection as "Tuesdays that smell vaguely of lemons"? Go ahead. Who's to stop you?

And yet, despite humanity's great strides in achieving technological wonders, we have somehow failed to invent specialized software that is solely and exclusively dedicated to managing magazines. Instead, one must resort to using book management software like Alfa Ebooks Manager or Adobe Digital Editions, which is a bit like using a rubber chicken to clean your house: surprisingly effective, but not quite what the manufacturers intended. These programs come equipped with built-in or customizable features that can be adapted for wrangling electronic magazines, including functions like importing and exporting magazines, batch editing metadata and creating collections. They offer a range of powerful tools that, while ostensibly intended for books, seem to work just as well for magazines – a reminder that sometimes in life, it helps to be a little adaptable.

The pièce de résistance of magazine management software is its uncanny ability to search, sort and categorize magazines based on extremely specific criteria, like a hyper-intelligent librarian who can remember exactly which shelf, box, or alternate dimension contains that one issue from the 1970s that happens to mention cheese manufacturing. Users can search for magazines based on title, author, keywords, genre, or any other metadata that they might have dreamt up. In moments, they are presented with the precise magazine they were looking for, or at least something close enough to pacify them until coffee is available. In addition, sorting and categorizing magazines by publication date, rating, or other criteria allows users to create personalized reading lists or specialized collections, perhaps even based on which ones would make a Vogon faint. Ultimately, magazine management software offers unparalleled organization, accessibility and customization, giving users the kind of control that would make even the most ambitious galactic overlord jealous.

See also: Top 5 eBook Organizers