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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?

#71

Post by masklinn »

rdsubhas wrote: post #55
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...

A dozen actions to get each book in the system sounds OK if you're adding a book every day, or a few books a week/month, not to input hundreds or thousands.

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

#72

Post by vessenes »

Oh, I am very pleased to see this request, and I may have some actual help for you.

A number of years ago a west coast startup spent quite a lot of time on a product that could identify books by their spine image which I think is what you want here; finding isbns and barcode scanning them is totally impractical at this scale.

A few months before they closed up shop, I introduced them to Brewster kahle at the internet archive and convinced them to leave a copy of their database with the internet archive.

I have no idea what happened after that, but I believe they did send the data over. Machine learning is vastly different today than when they launched, and even back then they had enough data that they could get 10/12 of my books in a single photo; I really encourage you to get in touch with the archive.

The company was called bitlit then Shelfie.

As a side note I got interested because I thought it would be great to get a spine image as an api for rendering my ebooks as a library in vr/ar - I still think this would be cool.

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

#74

Post by jccalhoun »

It can definitely be done but I don't know the details.

A couple times a year the local Half Price Books Outlet does a "fill a bag for $20" event and every time there are at least a couple people there with shopping carts full of bags of books.

They have dedicated bar code scanners attached to their phones and will scan books at around 1 a second. I don't know what software they are using but clearly they are looking up prices to see what they can get to sell for a profit.

I use goodreads to keep track of my own book collection and using the camera and the goodreads app usually takes 30 seconds plus to focus on the bar code and then to look it up. So whatever they are using is much faster than that.

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

#75

Post by phonebanshee »

influx wrote: post #46

There’s a whole universe of folks selling used books on Amazon FBA. I suggest start with a google search of exactly that. There’s apps which allow you to scan UPC codes and look up a price on Amazon. I’d personally sort the books by market value. Sell the books that are profitable, trash the ones which are not, save the ones which are very rare or have no UPC code, and use the money to grow the storage space.

Except you're talking about a guy who seems to be happy getting containers filled with almost certainly worthless books. I doubt his values and yours are aligned.

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

#76

Post by rossdavidh »

nsomaru wrote: post #8

Goodreads has a scanner in their app (on iOS/Android) that can scan covers although for some reason it automagically adds those books into a "to-read" shelf but I guess this isn't a problem for you if you create an account for the purpose. The API is severely rate-limited (1rps), non-standard oath and badly documented, but you should be able to get some xml out of it and parse that however you'd like.

I'm wondering about the option of having a (cheap, not worth stealing) smartphone, with the Goodreads app on it, logged in to the Goodreads account for this place. People who come in are asked to use it to scan 10 books, and move them over to the "scanned and catalogued" shelves, in addition to paying the $1 fee to get a book. Most people would be fine with that, and over time you get it all scanned.

Goodreads cannot recognize anything, but since it works on either book cover or barcode it will work on lots.

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

#77

Post by niedzielski »

I have a related problem on a much smaller scale (only a few hundred books) in that I wish to make full digital copies of my books. I reached out to Archive.org but they can't use them due to copyrights. I'm looking into https://1dollarscan.com/ but it's a destructive scanning technique.

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

#78

Post by kd5bjo »

cosminul wrote: post #53
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. B…

> If you don't leave enough space you'll have to shift all the books after that letter.

This is what card files were originally invented for— number all the shelves, put your new book wherever there’s room, and put a card with the title and shelf number in a sorted drawer. When you get rid of the book, get rid of the card.

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

#79

Post by GnarfGnarf »

Photograph the books, a dozen at a time. Put a box number label next to the books. Put the books in their box, glue the label to the box. Stack the boxes.

Sort the boxes by height, line them up in a row. Put slats of wood between the rows to distribute and stabilize the load.

I wrote a program to automatically generate simple HTML files to display the images. See sample:

http://kyber.ca/b/index.html

Use OCR to digitize title & author..

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

#80

Post by walterbell »

Please, please tag each batch of books with a unique lot number, so they can be associated with a specific estate or deceased bookstore. One or more humans spent a lot of time curating those collections. If one of the lots was well curated, then anyone who finds a book that they like will want to see the other books in that lot.

Source: people who have spent years trying to find the names of the 8,000 books in R.A. Lafferty's personal library, lost after he died. About 300 title names have been recovered, https://www.ralafferty.org/tulsa-books/

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