![]() With that, adding your books to Google’s My Library feature is simplicity itself–the Google Books team has tweaked the workflow so that you can barcode scan and add lots of books very quickly. I’m sure you can get barcode scanners for cheaper (anyone remember the CueCat scanner that was free?), but the Adesso had good reviews. Well, there’s a neat hack for this too: Amazon carries the Adesso NuScan 1000 bar code scanner for $65.44 with free shipping. Why install software at all when a website will store the data for you? The only problem was how to tell Google which books I own. The suggestion was so obvious that I smacked my head. Last year I suggested potential Summer of Code projects and one of my favorite suggestions was “How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?” In the blog comments, Colin Colehour left an excellent comment: “Matt, Can’t you use Google Books to keep track of your book library at home? You can add books that you own to the ‘my library’ list and then export that as an xml file and they have RSS feeds.” This second pass was more tedious than the first, requiring as it did no scanning, just data entry.(Okay, if TechCrunch wrote about my video then I should probably at least do a blog post too.) Many of those books had their original receipts tucked inside, so I later added the purchase date, place, and price to my digital metadata. And many older paperbacks have barcodes on their back covers that scan incorrectly the right barcode is on the inside front cover.Īltogether, indexing just over 600 books took less time than I'd spent trying to get the Bluetooth scanner working. Some books didn't list their ISBNs at all, so I went searching on or Google for that data. There were a few special cases that required manual entry. ![]() If I accidentally scanned something twice, it pulled up the existing entry rather than make a new one. Delicious Library recognized the barcodes easily and spoke their names as it downloaded their information. The part of the process that was least curmudgeonly was the software. I finally caved and went about the scanning process the cumbersome way. Faced with that defeat, my project stalled.īut a pending move threatens those books with storage, and I wanted to know what I'd collected before they went out of sight. Although the scanner paired with my MacBook just fine and emitted the expected red light and beeped in recognition of a barcode, it never transmitted that data back to the computer, indicating a wasted purchase. I opted instead for a secondhand Microvision Flic scanner off eBay, which proved to be a mistake. Delicious Library supports Bluetooth devices and recommends (and sells) the Microvision RoV scanner, which costs hundreds of dollars. I decided to get a handheld barcode scanner. It seemed too laborious to lug my laptop to each shelf of books (or to carry each book to my computer desk) and scan the titles individually. It didn't take long to scan all 200 movies or so.īut books are a different matter: they're larger, bulkier, and sometimes more fragile. It was a project that had to wait until I had a computer with an inbuilt webcam, as then I could hold my DVD cases up to the monitor and have their barcodes scanned, downloading all their metadata from. ![]() I'd already compiled a similar catalog of my DVDs using the Macintosh program Delicious Library.
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