Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 142 posts

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

#81

Post by slm_HN »

jccalhoun wrote: post #74

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…

Yep, I've seen the exact same thing at my local used bookstore on normal business days. Someone with an ISBN scanner methodically scanning every book and buying whatever the app told him.

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

#82

Post by walterbell »

rdl wrote: post #33

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.

1DS $100/month is about 30 books of ~300 pages (3+ "sets" of 100 pages, rounded up).

Scanning is only worthwhile for books which are not already available in electronic form ... somewhere.

If you bought from Amazon, there's sometimes an option to get the ebook cheaply. Archive.org has many books. There are also e-books at public libraries, so it may be enough to keep a list/photos/calibre of all your titles and discard rarely-accessed books.

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

#83

Post by walterbell »

vessenes wrote: post #72

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…

This dataset would be useful if it can be extended. Do you recall how they seeded the collection of spine images?

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

#84

Post by walterbell »

xiconfjs wrote: post #62

While we are a bit on this topic: is there a alternative to calibre [1] for managing a shitload (50000+) of ebooks which is still performant? Specially ebooks which have no ISBN (PDF, whitepapers, etc) which only information about them is in their EXIF file data. [1] https://calibre-ebook.com

Performant for which function? Searching? Parsing metadata from imported files? Manual editing?

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

#86

Post by pronoiac »

profsnuggles wrote: post #39

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 goin…

I second or third librarything; I've used tags for things like "box1" or "shelf2."

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

#87

Post by dredmorbius »

kd5bjo wrote: post #78
cosminul wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That works well for closed stack collections. Open ones, not so much.

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

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #66

This is a complex project, though also a well-developed space -- it's much of what libraries do. Numerous queryable catalogues of book and other matrials exist, with Worldcat arguably the most developed of those: https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web-services/classify... The US Library of Congress also has a huge (if intimidating) amount of information available. http://eresources.loc.gov http://fortune.com/2017…

Abebooks has a freely-available inventory-management system, HomeBase: HomeBase is AbeBooks' free inventory management software and one of the most widely adopted programs for booksellers worldwide.

This easy-to-use program streamlines inventory management and bookselling on AbeBooks. HomeBase helps take care of everything from maintaining your inventory database, keeping track of buyers and issuing receipts, to uploading your active listings to sell on AbeBooks. Plus, you can also use HomeBase 3.0, to send your inventory to other marketplaces such as Amazon.

https://www.abebooks.com/homebase/software-inventory-managem...

There's a longer list of software and tools here:

https://www.whiteunicornbooks.com/home/bookinventoryprograms...

Post reply on HN