[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do I easily catalog a couple thousand ph...
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Ask HN: How do I easily catalog a couple thousand physical books?
I own a couple thousand books. I'd like to catalog them all. I have
a child who is a broke college student, so I was thinking of paying
them to do it over break. What's the most efficient way to do this
from an INTAKE standpoint? I need to get all the ISBNs into a
database of some kind. (The only other info I need is whether or
not it's a hardcover or software -- that's something only the
physical copy can tell me, everything else I should be able to get
from the ISBN.) I don't want my daughter to have to find and key
all the ISBNs in. Can they be scanned in some way? Is the ISBN in
the UPC code? Could I buy a cheap bar code scanner and just have
her scan away?
Author : deanebarker
Score : 117 points
Date : 2021-09-21 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
| mindcrime wrote:
| Using the Goodreads app for the initial data loading might be the
| easiest way. You don't even have to specifically scan the
| barcode, it can often identify your book from the cover alone.
| I'll defer to what @Jtsummers said about getting your data out of
| their database though, as I have not tried that part myself
| (yet).
| [deleted]
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/review/import
|
| If you're logged in, at the top is an export option which will
| generate a CSV file. It includes the ISBN if present and a lot
| of other columns of data that may be useful.
|
| I don't think that's how I did it when I pulled the data out
| years ago, but it works and involves no 3rd parties so that's
| nice.
| tom-thistime wrote:
| The bar code scanner idea (already mentioned by several people)
| is even better than it sounds. Almost magically good. Much, much
| better than manual entry.
| winsbe01 wrote:
| Apps like QRBot [1] have the ability to scan ISBNs (and barcodes
| generally), and have a "history" feature that keeps track of what
| you've scanned and lets you export (to CSV, among others). The
| app is free on both iPhone and Android (there is a paid version,
| don't know what extras it has or if it's just ad-free), but may
| want to verify how much history gets stored before you go scan-
| crazy.
|
| From a US perspective (may apply elsewhere), for books published
| relatively recently (within the last ~20 years or so), the ISBN
| is often part of the barcode on the back of the book (ISBN-13s
| (the updated standard) start with 978, so this is a good clue
| that the barcode is an ISBN). For a period of time prior to that
| (and perhaps still applicable to Mass Market Paperbacks), there
| is a barcode on the back that is NOT an ISBN, but there is an
| ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. I've not discovered any
| systematic way to pull an ISBN out of a non-ISBN barcode (though
| I haven't dug too far -- my collection hasn't reached 4 digits
| yet and I've been happy to type when scanning wasn't an option).
|
| Once you have the ISBNs, I like to query against the Open Library
| API [2], which is a part of the Internet Archive. The information
| in there is fairly robust, if inconsistent (the capitalization of
| titles is sometimes as printed on the title page, sometimes
| Library of Congress format, other minor things). They have a lot
| of data points available, such as cross-referenced IDs with
| Goodreads and LibraryThing, but again, this is community-
| supported data, so YMMV as to completeness or accuracy.
|
| Another note -- many books have _separate_ ISBNs for hardcover
| editions, trade paperback editions, mass market editions, eBooks,
| etc (and sometimes don 't have an ISBN at all for things like
| Book of the Month Club editions). I don't know if this is a
| requirement, or a luxury that big publishers have, but it is
| something I've noticed (you'll sometimes see multiple ISBNs
| listed on the copyright page, along with their formats -- also
| you may see related editions on Indiebound [3], along with their
| ISBNs). A cursory glance at Open Library doesn't seem to have a
| data point distinction for this (which is unfortunate), so you
| may still have to note this, but _theoretically_ it may be
| possible to get this information from the ISBN directly at some
| point.
|
| Source for ^^: I read a lot, have a lot of books, briefly ran a
| (failed) specialized online bookstore, and wrote a CLI tool [4]
| for myself to solve this very issue.
|
| [1]: https://qrbot.net/locale/en/ [2]:
| https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books [3]:
| https://www.indiebound.org/ [4]:
| https://github.com/winsbe01/booki
| undoware wrote:
| I had a gig doing this once in grad school. Here's my method. It
| worked great:
|
| First, close the library (or library section) until your work is
| complete. It's critical that the books not go wandering or get
| rearranged during this process.
|
| Next, grab an SLR (or equivalent mirrorless) camera with video
| mode. Set it to video mode. In good lighting, play it over the
| shelves, one by one, from left to right. Slowly.
|
| Make sure the spines are all legible. This is your set-of-books.
|
| Set yourself or someone else up transcribing the titles from the
| recording, in the order shelved. Check it a couple of times. If
| you missed a book, or couldn't read the spine from the recording,
| add it here.
|
| Once you are certain your list is accurate and complete, print
| (or put on your phone) the list of books. (Still in the order
| shelved.)
|
| Now, again, working top-down, left-to-right, take books out in
| sets of eight. (I like eight because it's a nice round number,
| it's near miller's magic number, and it's also a number of books
| I can typically carry.)
|
| For each 'byte' of eight books, take your SLR and, in photo mode,
| take a pic of the frontmatter page of that book -- the one
| containing the date of publication, and, most critically, the
| ISBN.
|
| Put the eight books back on the shelf and take another eight.
| Repeat until complete. Be sure not to miss a book.
|
| Now you have a list of books and a set of pics. Guess what? They
| are the same length and in the same order. So, book 1 on your
| list is the first pic on your SLR. And so on.
|
| Now, you can OCR those pics for the ISBN. As backup/redundancy
| you can grab other info as well, e.g. publisher, etc. to sanity-
| check the results of your ISBN lookup.
|
| Congratulations, you now have enough information -- a title and
| and ISBN -- for e.g. Google Books to pull up the rest of the
| info, which you can sanity check against the other deets you
| OCRed out of the frontmatter page.
|
| Final tip: Calibre has a book information lookup thingy; it
| wasn't what I used back in the day, but AFAIK it should work
| great. It may be possible for you to simply populate the Calibre
| book list with titles and ISBNs, and have it just magically whisk
| other details -- date of publication etc. -- into the appropriate
| fields. Again, you can cross-check these (either exhaustively or
| spot-check) against the OCRed contents of the frontmatter pages,
| which (again) you associated with a book title in the initial
| step.
|
| Happy librarianing!
| anfractuosity wrote:
| I like the idea of photographing the books on the shelves, I
| wonder if you could possibly OCR the title of the book from the
| spine. Although I guess fonts used on books are pretty varied.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is a wonderful comment that juxtaposes any suggestion that
| requires buying a scanner. That said, I wonder if this works at
| the scale that OPs kid will be tasked with?
| undoware wrote:
| I processed a few thousand books this way. It scales nicely.
|
| (also, why is this on-topic, strictly-procedural comment I
| spent 30 minutes writing downvoted? Hacker news, you are
| fickle)
| throwaway2214 wrote:
| you can write something with https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/
| I used it in the past, with few tweaks it is very accurate.
|
| and then you can query goodreads or amazon to find the actual
| book
| pahool wrote:
| The "Handy Library" Android app includes an ISBN scanner and
| allows you to import and export collection data.
|
| You could also check out some of the tooling and APIs around
| openlibrary.org. Unfortunately, I think it's basically a moribund
| project, but may have sufficient tools for your needs. I know
| they have a list feature, but I don't think ingestion is
| particularly easy; nor am I sure of the import/export
| functionality around their lists.
|
| edit: I'd forgotten about librarything (mentioned in another
| comment). They have better tooling that openlibrary.
| poxwole wrote:
| I have a few thousand books myself so I wrote this.
| https://github.com/konsbn/xlibris this is almost exactly what you
| want
| yldreader wrote:
| Another vote for LibraryThing.com and a barcode reader or
| smartphone. I scanned in ~1100 books, and only ran into 15-20
| without ISBNs. All but 3-4 of those were easily input by title.
| But I like it because its very easy to keep up, and isn't a
| moneygrubbing advertising/tracking site like Goodreads. The phone
| app is very handy when wandering in bookstores-- easy to check if
| you own such and such a title.
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| You should ask Ancestry.com how they catalog hundreds of
| thousands of records...
|
| Hint: it's not manual and it's completely automated.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I'm interested in using RFID tags to help me locate my books.
| Does anyone do this?
| quercusa wrote:
| My family has used ReaderWare for years. It's got smart
| cataloging across multiple sources (including LoC for old books
| w/o an ISBN) and runs on a number of platforms. We use an old USB
| CueCat.
|
| https://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_...
| pronoiac wrote:
| As I put some books into storage, the LibraryThing app on my
| phone could use the camera to scan the isbn bar codes for my
| books, and I could tag them with "box 6" and the like. Searching
| for books without isbns wasn't hard.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'll second the recommendation for LibraryThing. I wanted to be
| able to shelve books by LoC call number and this has a pretty
| good (although not always complete) lookup for most call numbers
| (I have learned how to generate a call number for books that
| don't have them and also discovered that the University of
| Chicago Library doesn't use the same cutter numbers that the LoC
| and most other libraries use).
|
| LibraryThing's mobile app will scan barcodes just fine.
|
| The gotcha is that mass-market paperback before sometime in the
| 80s (I probably have the date wrong) do _not_ have the ISBN in
| them. These will need to be entered manually (not to bad with the
| mobile app which has a dedicated ISBN keyboard). It can also look
| up by the LOC catalog number (which is _not_ the call number but
| rather a consecutively assigned number which can be found on the
| copyright page of books published starting some time in the
| 1960s).
|
| ISBN, by the way, will tell you the format of the book. Paperback
| and hardcover books have separate ISBNs.
| mongol wrote:
| Could be worth it to buy a USB scanner.
| 101008 wrote:
| ISBN are different for paperback and hardcovers, even for the
| same title, so you should be able to get that info from the ISBN
| :)
| rbobby wrote:
| Buy a cheap hand held battery operated wireless barcode scanner
| (cheap on AliExpress). These work really well for scanning stacks
| of books... pick the book up, zap, put the book down. You have to
| config the scanner to operate in "keyboard" mode or some such...
| basically what you scan gets typed as if from a keyboard.
|
| I used a simple Excel macro for data capture and lookup.
| Basically when a cell changed (book was scanned) it would request
| the book data from outpan.com. If outpan didn't know the upc beep
| and return to the cell, otherwise decode the response (json) and
| populate the spreadsheet row.
|
| Here's the excel macro (why I used the B column instead of the A
| column is a longer story): Private Sub
| Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range) If
| Target.Cells.Count <> 1 Then Exit Sub
| End If If
| Application.Intersect(Range("B2:B99999"), Range(Target.Address))
| Is Nothing Then Exit Sub End If
| Dim Ean Ean = CStr(Target.value)
| Dim Url Url = "https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/" +
| Ean + "?apikey=[haha get your own key haha]"
| Dim HttpRequest Set HttpRequest =
| CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") HttpRequest.Open
| "GET", Url, False HttpRequest.Send
| Set json = New VbsJson Set o =
| json.Decode(HttpRequest.ResponseText) If Not
| IsEmpty(o("error")) Then Beep
| ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select Else
| booktitle = o("name") If IsNull(booktitle) Then
| Beep ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
| Else If IsVarArrayEmpty(o("attributes")) Then
| Author = "" PublishedOn = ""
| Else If
| IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Author(s)")) Then
| Author = "" Else
| Author = o("attributes")("Author(s)") End
| If If
| IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Publication Date")) Then
| PublishedOn = "" Else
| PublishedOn = o("attributes")("Publication Date")
| End If End If
| Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column - 1).value = Cells(Target.Row -
| 1, Target.Column - 1).value Cells(Target.Row,
| Target.Column + 1).value = booktitle
| Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 2).value = Author
| Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 3).value = PublishedOn
| End If End If End Sub
| Function IsVarArrayEmpty(anArray As Variant) Dim i As
| Integer If IsObject(anArray) Then
| IsVarArrayEmpty = False Else On Error
| Resume Next i = UBound(anArray, 1)
| If Err.Number = 0 Then If i < 0 Then
| IsVarArrayEmpty = True Else
| IsVarArrayEmpty = False End If
| Else IsVarArrayEmpty = True
| End If End If End Function
|
| edit: you will need VbsJson from http://demon.tw/my-work/vbs-
| json.html (why that's a chinese page I don't know all I know was
| it was a single file json parser that was easy to work with for
| this).
|
| edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple
| of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.
| GianFabien wrote:
| I'd like to commend you for publishing your working code. This
| is a great help for somebody wishing to replicate your
| excellent work.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| similar question, is there a good way to do this for video games?
| I probably have a couple hundred physical games and would loves
| to not have to manually build a spreadsheet of them
| Poiesis wrote:
| While I haven't used it (and it's a Mac-only app with a companion
| iOS app for scanning), I've heard many people rave about
| Delicious Library from Delicious Monster: http://www.delicious-
| monster.com
| js2 wrote:
| No price anywhere I can find on that site. It costs $39 in the
| U.S. Mac App Store though if you want to know before trying it.
| haswell wrote:
| I'm a very early user of Delicious Library, and I really loved
| it back when I was using it. At some point, I lost my library
| (my fault, not the app's) and could never be bothered to start
| over.
|
| With all of that said, the thing that I loved about Delicious
| is how rich the experience was, and the ability to catalog any
| type of media.
|
| Looking at their site now though...it really looks like it's
| stuck in 2009, with HTTP-only site to boot. Has anyone used
| Delicious recently?
| Terretta wrote:
| Release notes reference March 2020: http://www.delicious-
| monster.com/release-notes/
|
| Downloads reference Big Sur (Nov 2020).
| buescher wrote:
| Delicious Library is (was?) one of the things that could get me
| to buy a Mac, but hasn't yet. I'd love to hear if it's still as
| class-leading as it was back before the smartphone era.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Honestly?
|
| I have about 5,000 books. I just sat down with a spreadsheet and
| entered the particulars for every one like any librarian in
| existence over the last 2000 years would do. I did this over a
| few months with 1-8 hours of effort in a burst.
|
| A lot of things still have no quick and automated solution.
|
| When I'm doing accounting and financial analysis, it's still
| primarily a numbers grind of data entry, cross checking and
| analysis.
| mystixx wrote:
| I use the free version of Libib.com [1]. Both the Android and iOS
| apps work just great. The app has an integrated barcode scanner
| and automatically looks up for the book's info. You can even
| export the catalog as csv.
|
| [1] https://www.libib.com
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| I've been a happy user of the (free) version of libib for ~8
| months now. Android and website both work great for my purposes
| (800 books, manually added) but as parent states the service
| can be used with a barcode scanner for larger libraries.
| quinndupont wrote:
| I use Libib as well. It has a blazing fast barcode scanner,
| though manual entry is a bit cumbersome. They seem like a good
| company, though longevity might be a concern. There is an easy
| export option, anyways.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Ditto, I used Libib for a much smaller library (500 or so) and
| scanned everything when I moved last month. It was handy
| because the phone app easily scanned most of my books and I
| could manually enter the ISBN for those that didn't.
| anfractuosity wrote:
| I used this android app to scan the ISBNs of my books -
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eleybourn....
|
| It's OSS: https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue
|
| From what I recall it also pulls additional info about the book
| from online.
| tantalor wrote:
| Donate them to a library. Then come back later after the
| librarian has cataloged them.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most books donated to a library to to the yearly book sale
| without being cataloged. What doesn't sell goes to goodwill
| similar thrift stores.
| ravila4 wrote:
| Barcode Scanner Phone app + Calibre
|
| I've used this (Android) barcode scanner before:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sukronmoh....
|
| On Calibre, simply go to "Add Books" > "Add books by ISBN", and
| paste a list of ISBNS. It will automatically download metadata
| and images for them.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kgodey wrote:
| I have 3,476 books cataloged at the moment on
| https://www.librarything.com/. I bought one of their barcode
| scanners (https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat) to do
| my initial cataloging but you could also use the scan feature on
| their mobile app.
|
| I prefer LibraryThing to Goodreads because LibraryThing focuses
| more on cataloging than social features. Their team also builds
| software for actual libraries. They source book data from almost
| 5,000 external sources so it's easy to map ISBN information with
| the correct edition and cover. You can also get your data out
| pretty easily, they offer exports in multiple formats.
|
| EDIT: For most books, you can scan the barcode on the back to get
| the ISBN. Mass market paperbacks seem to usually have separate
| UPCs. The ISBN barcode is often located on the reverse side of
| the front cover, so you want to scan that one instead of the one
| on the back.
| bssmith wrote:
| LT has a free iOS app - that's what I use to scan in my books.
| effingwewt wrote:
| It must be amazing to have your own library. I wonder sometimes
| what various collections would have looked like now, had I ever
| been allowed to keep one.
|
| I spent a lot of time in libraries over the years, especially
| as a kid, and being surrounded by books just does something.
|
| Now libraries feel more like hangout places where kids vape and
| talk on the phone.
|
| To be surrounded by books, in your own peaceful place, sounds
| like pure bliss.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I don't seem to see anything on their website, but does it have
| any features for understanding where a book is located? I have
| many different locations in the house (or at the office even)
| where it may be located, so having a "where" would be quite
| handy.
| kgodey wrote:
| I use their "Collections" feature for this. A book can be in
| multiple collections, and I have a "Basement" collection for
| books in storage. They also have tags that you can use for a
| similar purpose.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Ok, that could work. But I was thinking about something
| with more of a hierarchy. Home > Bedroom 1 > Bookshelf 2 >
| Shelf 3, kind of thing. And then move it to Home > Bedroom
| 2 > Nightstand 2, or whatever it is.
| powersnail wrote:
| You could name the tags with it's path:
|
| "Home/Bedroom1/Bookshelf2/shelf3"
|
| I've seen this in some databases that store tree
| structures.
| Agathos wrote:
| Oh wow they still have CueCats to sell?
| Izkata wrote:
| From the sibling links it looks more like they continued
| making them - it now uses USB instead of PS/2.
| kgodey wrote:
| I don't think they make them anymore, according to this
| website[1], DigitalConvergence had an inventory of 3
| million PS/2 CueCats and 1/2 million USB CueCats when they
| folded. I'm pretty sure LibraryThing bought some of them,
| they first started selling them in 2006 [2].
|
| [1] http://www.cexx.org/cuecat.htm#usb
|
| [2] https://blog.librarything.com/2006/10/librarything-
| does-cuec...
| Groxx wrote:
| Would other barcode scanners work as well? I know the cuecat
| has a cult following and a fun history, but you can get modern
| handheld scanners for about the same price (up through "far far
| more expensive" obviously). But I have no idea if librarything
| integrates with them as smoothly.
| [deleted]
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Almost certainly any barcode scanner would work. A barcode
| scanner is essentially a keyboard emulator. It types in the
| value it scans into whatever field the cursor is in. You can
| also program them using a set of special barcodes you can
| download. A nice feature is to make it hit 'enter' after
| scanning to activate a feature or 'tab' to jump to the next
| field!
| privong wrote:
| > one of their barcode scanners
| (https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat)
|
| That's a blast from the past! I remember getting a CueCat in
| the mail (I guess in 2000, based on the timeline in the
| Wikipedia article[0]). Neat to see that they've found another
| life (many others, by the sounds of it).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
| turtlebits wrote:
| FWIW, the CueCat works but is fairly slow at scanning. If you
| have a large volume of books, it's worth spending a little
| more to get a faster scanner.
| threeio wrote:
| yah faster barcode readers are surprisingly cheap these
| days...
| BeetleB wrote:
| Chiming in: Another happy LT user here.
| dmd wrote:
| Another happy user of Librarything here. It provides a
| beautiful public-facing catalog[0] if you want in addition to
| the full[1] one.
|
| Most importantly for me, Librarything lets you add books that
| _do not have an ISBN_ , unlike every one of their competitors
| I've tried. Nearly 20% of my books are too old to have an ISBN,
| so that's pretty important to me.
|
| [0] https://www.librarycat.org/lib/ddrucker [1]
| https://www.librarything.com/profile/ddrucker
| x0x0 wrote:
| I'm super curious -- do you mind sketching out what books you
| collect that generally don't have an isbn, if you have time?
|
| Thanks for indulging my curiosity. Cheers!
| type0 wrote:
| I would like to collect some 19th century and early 20th
| science and technology books, those wouldn't have the ISBN.
| Electricity, telegraphy and radio, industrial production,
| that sort of things. History of technology is fascinating,
| and sometimes you can find those books very cheap or even
| get those for free from someone clearing their grandpas
| attic.
|
| edit: I don't own any but regret not buying one good
| collection recently for cheap, but it would have taken a
| considerable amount of space on the bookshelf. There's
| definitely difference in occasionally looking through
| physical book, the digital ones don't offer the same joy
| :-)
| dmd wrote:
| You can look for yourself! Go to
| https://www.librarything.com/catalog/ddrucker/yourlibrary
| and select style E, then sort by ISBN so all the blanks are
| at the top!
| aardvark179 wrote:
| ISBNs were only introduced in the 70s, and I have quite a
| lot of second hand books that predate its introduction.
| Even if a book does have an ISBN there are a significant
| number from before bar codes became ubiquitous so are
| slightly more annoying to scan.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Haha same, made me instantly think of 'The 9th Gate' which
| I always loved for the showcasing of the rare book world.
| I'd always wondered if that's how it really is out there.
| One man with a priceless collection on the floor, another
| with his in an air-tight high-tech vault in a high-rise.
| nsm wrote:
| I cobbled together something similar using a couple of javascript
| libraries. It is a really simple web-app that you can open on any
| phone, and it uses the phone camera to scan the barcode. It saves
| the results to a Google Sheets (what I wanted). The code is
| public, mostly because I couldn't bring myself to clean it up. If
| you are interested, I could make it public. I wrote about it at
| https://nikhilism.com/post/2021/tracking-books-i-read-using-...
| metaloha wrote:
| You could put together an OCR app for their phone that could scan
| the title and author from the spine of the book (or cover) and do
| a lookup against something like the Google Books API or Open
| Library to get the ISBN (or store the work in your account on
| that service).
| chubot wrote:
| Honest question: what's the benefit of cataloguing books? I'm
| surprised so many people do it.
|
| I have 3 tall bookshelves of books but don't really feel the need
| to catalogue them. I sort them by topic and sometimes physical
| size and it seems fine.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I can think of three or four good reasons:
|
| 1. To prevent buying duplicates. I own enough books (on the
| order of thousands) that I can't remember all the ones I own,
| and occasionally buy something only later to discover that I
| just bought a 2nd (or 3rd) copy.
|
| 2. Insurance purposes. If I had a fire or something I imagine I
| might need the catalog, photos, etc. as part of my claim
| process.
|
| 3. Related to (2), but if I had to replace a substantial
| portion of my library, it would help if I had the items in the
| library cataloged.
|
| 4. Locating books. I have enough books jammed into my apartment
| that I sometimes struggle to locate a particular one. Or even
| remember if I own a particular title at all or not (see (1)
| above). A catalog, with notes like "In living room, on bookcase
| A, shelf 2" or "in office, bookcase Q, shelf 4" would be a huge
| benefit at times. Even more so for the handful that would fall
| into the "Boxed up and moved to storage locker on 08/16/2019.
| Box labeled BR549" category or whatever.
|
| _I have 3 tall bookshelves of books but don't really feel the
| need to catalogue them_
|
| Well sure. If I only had 3 bookcases of books I don't know if
| I'd bother either. But when you get into the multiple thousands
| of books, it becomes more important.
| gjm11 wrote:
| My main reason is the same as mindcrime's and daggersandcars's:
| I found that every now and then I'd buy books I'd forgotten I
| already had, and it was annoying.
|
| At one point I thought there would be value in recording where
| in the house each book was, but it soon became obvious that
| there wasn't so I stopped. If space considerations required
| some of them to be in boxes, it would become valuable again. (I
| _do_ tag each book with what it 's about, and shelve things by
| subject, so in some ambiguous cases the catalogue might be
| useful for finding books. Hardly ever has been, though.)
|
| It's occasionally useful when I know there was a book with
| such-and-such in the title but can't remember the author or the
| exact title (though not _very_ useful since usually in such
| cases it 's also possible to find the relevant shelf and browse
| until I find it. But you can't grep a bookcase.)
|
| And if I didn't have a list I'd wonder every now and then how
| many books are actually in the house, and waste time
| estimating.
|
| As mindcrime says, this isn't something that has much value for
| a few bookcases of books, but the value increases as the number
| of books grows.
| daggersandscars wrote:
| When I had ~1000 books, I catalogued them to avoid buying books
| I already had and to ease lending them to my friends.
|
| Back in the pre-smart phone days, there was a Mac app that used
| a webcam to scan book barcodes. The author wrote a neat article
| on how it was better to scan barcodes really fast and throw
| away the noise than to try to scan the barcode perfectly the
| first time.
| BigBalli wrote:
| https://MyBookList.club Scan the ISBN and it adds it to your
| library. Then you can also export to CSV if you want.
|
| Disclaimer: I made the app. Happy to give free promo codes to
| anyone interested in trying and give feedback!
| Jtsummers wrote:
| If you're willing to use it, Goodreads lets you scan books to add
| them to your collection. I've not used it in a while, but I
| believe there are easy enough ways to get your data out once
| entered into it. I did that once a long time ago, I imagine it
| hasn't gotten too much worse since then.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| As an interesting anecdote, the history of book digitization and
| its implications in fair use / copyright in regards to what
| you're trying to do is actually pretty storied (primarily
| litigated between Google and the Authors Guild over the course of
| the past decade).[0]
|
| [0] - https://cdlib.org/services/pad/massdig/mass-digitization-
| his...
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| You definitely want to pick up a handheld bar code scanner and
| dump all the data into a csv.
|
| From there it would take a few hours of playing with the data to
| get it in whichever form you prefer
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I did that for about 70 books recently. I purchased a scanner for
| very little (about 200 dkk, no idea what it would cost in USD),
| put it in the USB on my laptop and opened a spreadsheet. The
| handheld scanner automatially "enters" a newline once it has
| written the ISBN number, so the only thing you have to do is move
| onto the next book. You can scan books faster than you can pull
| them out and put them back.
|
| Actually getting the book info from the ISBN was very time
| consuming, I didn't know about Library Thing.
|
| You can almost certainly use a smartphone, but that will be a lot
| slower, comes with the risk of dropping it and then you don't
| have a bar code scanner left over for other projects.
| AndrewLiptak wrote:
| There was a great bit of free software that I had downloaded a
| bunch of years ago, LibraryDB, which allowed you to set up your
| own software. If memory serves, you could hook up a laser scanner
| and scan the barcode, which would make things pretty easy for
| you, but I can't seem to find the software online anymore.
|
| But to be honest, I've always found cataloging and data entry to
| be a lot of fun, and there's something meditative about entering
| a book's title, date, author, ISBN, etc. into a system. I found
| that it helped me figure out what I have and think about why I'm
| keeping some books. It also led to some neat discoveries about
| certain books. I found a couple that had been signed that I'd
| never realized had been signed!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I sampled books from my personal collection and found many didn't
| have an ISBN. Officially ISBN started in 1970, and I just found
| one on a book that was printed in 1972, I'm not sure what the
| adoption curve was like.
|
| ISBN is also not guaranteed to be a primary key. It's designed to
| serve the needs of new book sellers. If a book goes out of print
| the publisher can reissue the same ISBN to a new book. It's
| unusual, but South End Press notably was resentful about paying
| for new blocks of ISBN numbers and recycled ISBNs to "stick it to
| the man".
|
| Some books have an ISBN barcode on them
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu...
|
| but you don't want to waste time with a "cheap" barcode reader
| made in China and sold on EBay. I have played around with those
| and find that they read barcodes when they feel like reading
| barcodes and it is quicker to type the codes in.
| rosetremiere wrote:
| Do you have a source for the non-uniqueness of ISBN? Google
| didn't provide anything tangible and I'd be very interested in
| a reputable place confirming your claim.
|
| Actually, as far as I see [0] ISBN have to be unique. It seems
| like this "South End Press" is more of a case of a publisher
| going rogue than anything els.
|
| [0] https://www.isbn-international.org/content/isbn-assignment
| (see the '"Out of print" editions' bullet)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Stephanie Marlowe's reply to
|
| https://www.quora.com/Is-every-book-has-a-unique-isbn-If-
| yes...
|
| points out the non-uniqueness of ISBNs. I used to work in the
| IT department of a major university library and it was a
| problem that the librarians were aware of.
|
| It takes exactly one "rouge" publisher to make a problem.
| (Funny I used to know the people at South End Press)
| homarp wrote:
| rogue or communist publisher?
| anonAndOn wrote:
| The ISBN might be unique, but that doesn't mean the barcode
| on the cover is.[0]
|
| [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/style/dan-brown-advice-
| bo...
| wl wrote:
| There's a certain rare, out-of-print book that took me a couple
| of years to track down. It shares an ISBN with another common,
| inexpensive, in-print book whose only similarity to the rare
| one is that it came from the same speciality publisher. Every
| time I found a copy of the rare book on various used book
| websites, the common one showed up on my porch instead.
| Apparently there are a lot of people who treat ISBN as a
| primary key. A non-trivial number of sellers thought I was
| trying to pull a return scam on them because they could not be
| convinced that ISBNs are not unique. The fact that the book I
| tried to buy generally listed for around $300 and the book I
| was actually sent went for $15 used really made returns
| difficult.
|
| My search finally ended when a copy showed up on eBay, complete
| with listing photos. I suspect the price I paid was much higher
| than usual for a book with similar desirability and rarity
| because the ISBN collision made it much harder to find.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Dumb question: If the book was harder for buyers to find,
| wouldn't that drive the price down, because not everyone who
| wanted to bid on it would be able to do so?
| Dopameaner wrote:
| I am awed that you have a couple of thousand physical books.
|
| 1) How long did it take for you to collect all of them?
|
| 2) What are the books mostly centered on? tech? polticis?
| fiction?
|
| 3) Do you happen to know whats your read? and to be read stat?
| gjm11 wrote:
| I'm not OP, but I also have thousands of books (a little over
| 4100 at last count), so I guess my answers might be of
| interest.
|
| 1. I'm about 50 years old. (The furthest back my records go is
| 2004, when I was about 35 and the count was about 2300.)
|
| 2. Of the 4100 books in my catalogue (it's a CSV file, very
| high-tech), 1233 are fiction. Rough counts for some non-fiction
| subject areas: science 520, mathematics 420, philosophy 250,
| computing 220. Others with substantial numbers: religion 270
| (I'm not religious, but I used to be and my wife still is),
| humour 240, history 210, children's books 180 (may be wrong; we
| don't always bother to record these and sometimes we get rid of
| them since children grow), reference works 110 (dictionaries,
| encyclopaedias, etc.), music 100, puzzles 100, poetry 100,
| language 100, books of essays 100, cookery 100 (these are
| mostly actual cookery books, which maybe don't really belong in
| the same list), biography 90, literature 90 (meaning literary
| criticism, books about books, that sort of thing; actual works
| of literature are mostly under "fiction"), politics 80,
| autobiography 75 ("biography" earlier excludes these), games 65
| (this is things like chess books, not books that are somehow
| also games), education 65.
|
| 3. I think about 10% of the books are unread at any given time.
| ripperdoc wrote:
| I'm not sure of the value for me to catalog all books just for
| the titles. What I would like is whenever I search Google, it
| would also search my books and tell me which book to open. It
| feels like a lot of knowledge sits on my shelves that I'm not
| really using. Not sure if that exists, but obviously the hard
| part is getting access to full-text contents of books - scanning
| pages by myself would be extremely time consuming.
| [deleted]
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