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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?

#51

Post by Freak_NL »

billfruit wrote: post #22
BeniBoy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a local LP shop, they had a sign saying "If you misshelve a LP, you might as well steal it, at least someone will listen to it" (approximate translation). Shelving in instead central to many specialty shops!

Yes, but there is something to be told for wading through mountains of junk to unearth something notable, I think many book nerds connect to that feeling.

One banana box full of random books: sure. Fun to dig into and see what's there.

Twenty unsorted banana boxes: every book just becomes a blur (as in, “Oh great, another Danielle Steele novel, and another bible, and another Excel 97 for dummies, …”).

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

#52

Post by zimpenfish »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved? Personally, his place sounds like my favorite kind of book shop. A lot of bookworms prefer wandering through dense forests of precariously-balanced piles of books. Is he getting those people, or is he getting people that are expecting Barnes & Noble? If they really do need to be cataloged, then the next thing is to forget all about trying to inventory the entir…

> First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved?

For insurance purposes, probably, yeah, especially if there's anything rare, antique, valuable, etc.

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

#53

Post by cosminul »

pjc50 wrote: post #15

One of these days I need to write my essay titled "Rubbish has no SKU". I've seen a few of these, and the basic minimum difference between "pulp waiting to happen" and "bookshop" is basic shelving. Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise. Now it's possible for browsers to actually find things. When you put them on Amazon this will also help find th…

> Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise.

I worked on a similar project, with thousands of books to organize. We did just that, because it seemed common sense. We had a couple of issues:

1. We found that sorting books by category took quite a lot of time. For every book we had to spend a couple of seconds deciding in which category it should go. By the time we started wishing we had put them all together, sorted only by alphabet, it was already late.

2. Shelving books alphabetically is a problem when they keep coming and going. How do you know how much space to leave on the shelf for a specific letter? Maybe now you have 10 books by Stephen King, but the next container will have 50 more. If you don't leave enough space you'll have to shift all the books after that letter.

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

#55

Post by rdsubhas »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved? Personally, his place sounds like my favorite kind of book shop. A lot of bookworms prefer wandering through dense forests of precariously-balanced piles of books. Is he getting those people, or is he getting people that are expecting Barnes & Noble? If they really do need to be cataloged, then the next thing is to forget all about trying to inventory the entir…

Instead of creating an app for managing the books and integrating with Amazon API, I'd suggest Calibre which is an excellent open source ebook app. You can use it to manage paper books as well, and it will download all metadata from a given ISBN including Amazon ratings, cover page and so on.

https://dearauthor.com/ebooks/dear-jane-ebooks/dear-jane-can...

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

#56

Post by rdsubhas »

1k wrote: post #49

Get a barcode scanner, scan the ISBN and use that to do a API query on Amazon to retrieve title, author, category, price, etc. Store this info in a DB. Some scenarios: 1. Generally lookup should return something. Store these book by categories, e.g. business, children, fiction, etc. in their shelves/containers for physical browsing by your customers. The more subcategories you can do the better. 2. If price is bigger…

I'd highly suggest Calibre. https://dearauthor.com/ebooks/dear-jane-ebooks/dear-jane-can...

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

#57

Post by Freak_NL »

Theodores wrote: post #50

Hay On Wye is a town known for the book shops in Wales. Maybe this is the business model that you need to look into. What Hay on Wye is known for is a literary festival. So there was a pivot to this a few decades ago that has worked. This is the guy that started it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Booth Note the way it started, buying library stock from America that was available due to libraries closing. Some…

> […] has put the place on the map, literally.

I'm pretty sure Hay On Wye was quite literally on a lot of maps before that. Figuratively speaking you are probably correct.

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

#58

Post by mikepurvis »

Surprised to see no mention of AbeBooks yet. We have an indie bookstore in Waterloo which is integrated with them and it seems to work pretty well. He tells me he still does most of his business in the IRL shop, but there's a steady stream of people buying online as well. Plus, it's nice for him to be able to quickly check how many of something he already has before committing to buying a bunch more of them. See: https://www.abebooks.com/old-goat-books-waterloo-on-canada/1...

I'm not sure what options there are for hardware integrations, but Abe provides at least online inventory and ordering capabilities. I assume if you had a barcode scanner capable of acting as a USB keyboard and entering ISBNs, it would go pretty quickly.

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

#59

Post by dredmorbius »

jocmeh wrote: post #13
viraptor wrote: post #4

Ask a professional. And by that I mean - get in touch with Jason Scott: https://twitter.com/textfiles

If we say books and professional, I think of the Internet Archive. They developed their own software which is used on the TT Scribe system, see https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem . These people run an amazing operation, but even for them this still involves a lot of manual labor. In the end, what it takes is a person to grab a book and type in the title.

Jason Scott is the Internet Archive's Free Range Archivist.
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