Have you thought about using hashes? Wouldn't it be a little easier to manage? I once was very confused by them, and I still am depending on how complex the data is, but I know enough to get what I need done... done. I'll leave this here for you to examine :)

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;  # $Data::Dumper::Terse  = 1;

my %library;    #this is where we store title, author, date

my $i = 1;      #iterator for hash key name

while (<DATA>) {
    my ( $title, $author, $date ) = split /\|/, $_; # the '|' just sep
+erates records
    chomp($date);   #because date has newline read from my example
    push @{ $library{ $i++ } }, $title, $author, $date; #put it in the
+ hash of arrays '%library'
}

foreach my $key ( sort { $a <=> $b } keys %library ) { #sort isnt nece
+ssary but i put it there to give you an example
    print "Book #$key\n";
    print "Title: @{$library{$key}}[0]\n";
    print "Author: @{$library{$key}}[1]\n";
    print "Date: @{$library{$key}}[2]\n\n";
}

# use Data::Dumper to quickly verify data;
# print Dumper %library;

__DATA__
Beginning Perl|Simon Cozens|May 25, 2000
Modern Perl|Chromatic|2012
Impatient Perl|Greg London|Feb 7, 2004
Extreme Perl|Robert Nagler|2004
Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason|Dave Rolsky, Ken Williams|Oct 2002
[download]

If you want to try out this code, click the download link below and copy/paste.
Have fun learning!