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Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#31

Post by heraclius »

flurdy wrote: post #29

It may very expensive in time and resources to scan it all even if it is just the covers. You need to work out how long it takes to fetch a book from the barn or container, flatten/unbind if necessary, scan the cover, rebind, and put back. Then multiply by how many books... I worked at a small startup in the early 2000s that somehow got massive contract to digitalise a Middle Eastern Oil & Gas company's very very ext…

I think “scan” here was in the sense of “scan the ISBN to catalogue the book”, not scan the insides. Since many of these are old books, many of them will not be perfect bindings. Scanning their contents therefore either requires opening the books and moving the pages (as Google Books did) or cutting the spine, which would be highly unhelpful since that would preclude any rebinding of the books into anything other than a perfect binding, reducing strength, repairability, and the ability to fold flat.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#32

Post by MayeulC »

This sounds like a use-case inventaire.io ought to support. I'll try to ask them about it. They use wikidata for filling up book metadata.

Otherwise, as stated elsewhere in this thread, Zotero can usually find books with very little information:ISBN or title. It might be worth trying to set up an OCR with it.

In any case, if you go to the length of taking a picture for each book, you might as well save them and make the dataset public, for OCR training purposes (and a second pass). There is also the mechanical Turk option if you go this way.

And as someone stated already, you should plan the physical layout in advance.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#33

Post by rdl »

My plan for books is to pull the rare/valuable ones, then subscribe for the $100/mo 100 book/mo plan at http://1dollarscan.com/ and send them all the rest, produce PDFs, and pulp the books. I have maybe 3000 books in storage and this would be preferable to anything else I've found, as I ultimately would rather consume them electronically.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#34

Post by 8_hours_ago »

Don’t forget about the Dewey decimal system. For the books with ISBNs, you can sort them into boxes by their Dewey decimal. If you don’t have time manually categorize the books without ISBNs, they can be put into “other” boxes and left unsorted

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#35

Post by jrgd »

georgespencer wrote: post #24

You might try Delicious Library: https://delicious-monster.com

I was going to second that; it's the first thing that came to my mind—but then it doesn't work for books without barcodes (or does it now?). I worked with version 2 a while back, it was great. The iPhone app to scan books without the laptop nearby requires version 3 though. The Mac app could also check the price the book sells for online.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#37

Post by thecupisblue »

Use a OCR service such as Firebase ML Text kit or the Amazon's similar offering or something and take pictures cover by cover, ping an API - even amazon or ebay might do to see if it exists and price of the book on average.

It also shouldn't be hard to up the speed by taking pictures of a stack of books - if you take an image of a stack of books and crop it book by book, training models to recognise books shouldn't be that hard but you could also use a CV solution (firebase, amazon, azure again) and then from the books it found in the stack ping the API for each one. This could probably be the fastest way if you can take a panorama and have it search from that.

Anyways, if you do it - try to get the price, ISBN and editions from the results.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#39

Post by profsnuggles »

I would check out https://www.librarything.com/ also. They have a decent app for scanning barcodes and retrieve data from multiple sources. Their own database which consists of lots of imported marc records from university libraries I believe, library of congress, amazon, etc. Then they have another project librarycat where you can set up your books as a lending library.

Cataloging a large number of books is not going to be an easy process unless they are all relatively new popular books. According to librarything my library is 439 books, every few years I delete my catalog and re-import them it takes about a full weekend. Older books don't have barcodes, old paperbacks have the ISBN barcode on the inside cover. Some books don't have ISBN numbers or Library of Congress numbers. So you will still end up doing a fair amount of manual entry and searching.

Re: Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books?

#40

Post by crispyambulance » 

    >  the barrier is allowing customers to find what they are looking for.
I am really glad that there are people like the old man who are willing to do stuff like this and people like yourself who are willing to help.

The real barrier, I think, is a bit more complicated than just being able to find stuff. It is also the fact he will be running out of space and that as more and more people find what they want the undesirable stuff (that no one wants) will just keep growing. There does need to be regular culling, I think, to keep weeding out the duplicates or books that no one wants. Also, there needs to be some effort to discover and sell the really valuable books which could produce occasional windfall funds to keep the endeavor going.

"The Book Thing" in Baltimore (https://bookthing.org/) which I have visited many times seems to be tackling this problem. It's basically a "free book" exchange. Massive. In a warehouse. It is a fairly popular place and is run by an interesting eccentric fellow with very particular ideals. I would recommend see how they do this stuff.

As for thoughts, I think that regardless of what he does, he will need one or more employees (or dedicated volunteers) to actually perform the indexing and physically organize the books.

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