book-cataloguing [Matthew's Journal]

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Thanks to

tamsinj, I have acquired a bar-code scanner. A Welch Allyn Scanteam 3400, to be precise. It's powered by a USB lead, and outputs down a serial line. I knocked up a short python script (214 lines, including UI, error checking de-duplication, etc.) to extract the ISBN from the barcode, then look that up on amazon (cribbing from

toothycat's perl somewhat!) and hackily screen-scrape the answer, and store the result in a file (with the option for the user to override or correct entries).

It works quite nicely, and I can do about 3 books/minute (including dealing with those that have no bar-code, or whose ISBN amazon doesn't know about, or have no ISBN, and carrying them all up and down stairs). I spent a while doing a couple of shelves' worth (59 books) to iron out the bugs in the UI, and I'm quite pleased with the result.

ETA: I did another couple of shelves, and now have 116 catalogued

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There are 16 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Yay! Shiny!

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In fact I might be tempted to borrow it at some point -- or to copy? How much was the scanner? Might get round to stopping being an evil windows user once the PhD is done (which doesn't sound entirely unlikely anymore)

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Excellent! Yay for snake-powered cataloguing.

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For lazy Windows users, try BookCat. Just slap in the ISBN, and it retrieves the book details.

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Might be interesting to pinch something from the Wikipedia ISBN thingy. Just for example here's a link for Dodie Smith's The Starlight Barking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1405224819 (chosen because I started that article and it's on my watchlist).

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I can see the birth of a new social activity, similar to an envelope stuffing party.

The book scanning party.

Borrow 4 or 5 scanners. Buy in drink. Invite friends around for an afternoon or evening of attacking your book shelves. Do food.

After several people in your circle of friends have done this, if they are all happy to stick the results in an online database (or some new custom peer to peer thingy, perhaps one designed for music and hacked for books), you'd have the basis for:
* bulk purcheses (20 people want the new Laurel Hamilton? Go for discount)
* book recommendations (hey, everyone has that book but me)
* a meta borrowing library
* dating site (oooh, Ellen's library is 95 % compatible with mine)

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I think we should call it librarything.com.

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I'm aware I could just upload all the ISBNs to librarything, but I didn't especially want to - I have enough daft social networking sites already :)

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Well, you don't have to use librarything as a daft social networking site -- you can just use it as a reasonably good user interface to a library list.

When I did mine I found I got quite quick at typing ISBNs in by hand, though a bar code reader would definitely have been a bonus for the fraction of our books that actually have them...

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Well we'll still be cataloguing our books by looking at them and typing stuff in cos of being antiquated, plus not all of them have bar codes ...

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I estimate rather fewer than one percent of the books that are our primary target for cataloguing (those inherited from my grandfather) have barcodes, or indeed ISBNs, or in several cases any hint of such details as a publishing date, or a publisher... If that job ever gets finished, then I suppose something like this might be useful for cataloguing the rather more mainstream/modern rest of our books.

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Only about 10% of my books so far have lacked ISBNs.

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My grandfather was a collector - very much for love rather than money, I may add - mainly of old children's books, books illustrated with woodcuts, and books from the very small presses like The Golden Cockerel. So the majority of them are way too old to have ISBNs. (We only have a relatively small proportion of his total collection, even if it doesn't feel like it as we are attempting to catalogue it!) The exceptions are the few other books that we were interested enough in to keep as well, mainly on Gilbert and Sullivan and madrigals I think ;-) I am cataloguing them partly for my interest and partly for the family's interest, though my uncle (the eldest son) had any with actual monetary rather than sentimental/interest value.

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*wants to borrow*

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It's powered by a USB lead, and outputs down a serial line.

I'm finding it hard to figure out why the status isn't delivered down the USB also...

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Well, yes. I think it's that the device is quite old, and the USB-power-lead replaces a power-brick. Searching online suggests the USB lead is an optional add-on.

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Matthew's Journal

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