What's the most efficient way to do this from an INTAKE standpoint? I need to get all the ISBNs into a database of some kind.
(The only other info I need is whether or not it's a hardcover or software -- that's something only the physical copy can tell me, everything else I should be able to get from the ISBN.)
I don't want my daughter to have to find and key all the ISBNs in. Can they be scanned in some way? Is the ISBN in the UPC code? Could I buy a cheap bar code scanner and just have her scan away?
I prefer LibraryThing to Goodreads because LibraryThing focuses more on cataloging than social features. Their team also builds software for actual libraries. They source book data from almost 5,000 external sources so it's easy to map ISBN information with the correct edition and cover. You can also get your data out pretty easily, they offer exports in multiple formats.
EDIT: For most books, you can scan the barcode on the back to get the ISBN. Mass market paperbacks seem to usually have separate UPCs. The ISBN barcode is often located on the reverse side of the front cover, so you want to scan that one instead of the one on the back.
I've used this (Android) barcode scanner before: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sukronmoh....
On Calibre, simply go to "Add Books" > "Add books by ISBN", and paste a list of ISBNS. It will automatically download metadata and images for them.
ISBN is also not guaranteed to be a primary key. It's designed to serve the needs of new book sellers. If a book goes out of print the publisher can reissue the same ISBN to a new book. It's unusual, but South End Press notably was resentful about paying for new blocks of ISBN numbers and recycled ISBNs to "stick it to the man".
Some books have an ISBN barcode on them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu...
but you don't want to waste time with a "cheap" barcode reader made in China and sold on EBay. I have played around with those and find that they read barcodes when they feel like reading barcodes and it is quicker to type the codes in.
LibraryThing's mobile app will scan barcodes just fine.
The gotcha is that mass-market paperback before sometime in the 80s (I probably have the date wrong) do not have the ISBN in them. These will need to be entered manually (not to bad with the mobile app which has a dedicated ISBN keyboard). It can also look up by the LOC catalog number (which is not the call number but rather a consecutively assigned number which can be found on the copyright page of books published starting some time in the 1960s).
ISBN, by the way, will tell you the format of the book. Paperback and hardcover books have separate ISBNs.
It's OSS: https://github.com/eleybourn/Book-Catalogue
From what I recall it also pulls additional info about the book from online.
First, close the library (or library section) until your work is complete. It's critical that the books not go wandering or get rearranged during this process.
Next, grab an SLR (or equivalent mirrorless) camera with video mode. Set it to video mode. In good lighting, play it over the shelves, one by one, from left to right. Slowly.
Make sure the spines are all legible. This is your set-of-books.
Set yourself or someone else up transcribing the titles from the recording, in the order shelved. Check it a couple of times. If you missed a book, or couldn't read the spine from the recording, add it here.
Once you are certain your list is accurate and complete, print (or put on your phone) the list of books. (Still in the order shelved.)
Now, again, working top-down, left-to-right, take books out in sets of eight. (I like eight because it's a nice round number, it's near miller's magic number, and it's also a number of books I can typically carry.)
For each 'byte' of eight books, take your SLR and, in photo mode, take a pic of the frontmatter page of that book -- the one containing the date of publication, and, most critically, the ISBN.
Put the eight books back on the shelf and take another eight. Repeat until complete. Be sure not to miss a book.
Now you have a list of books and a set of pics. Guess what? They are the same length and in the same order. So, book 1 on your list is the first pic on your SLR. And so on.
Now, you can OCR those pics for the ISBN. As backup/redundancy you can grab other info as well, e.g. publisher, etc. to sanity-check the results of your ISBN lookup.
Congratulations, you now have enough information -- a title and and ISBN -- for e.g. Google Books to pull up the rest of the info, which you can sanity check against the other deets you OCRed out of the frontmatter page.
Final tip: Calibre has a book information lookup thingy; it wasn't what I used back in the day, but AFAIK it should work great. It may be possible for you to simply populate the Calibre book list with titles and ISBNs, and have it just magically whisk other details -- date of publication etc. -- into the appropriate fields. Again, you can cross-check these (either exhaustively or spot-check) against the OCRed contents of the frontmatter pages, which (again) you associated with a book title in the initial step.
Happy librarianing!
But to be honest, I've always found cataloging and data entry to be a lot of fun, and there's something meditative about entering a book's title, date, author, ISBN, etc. into a system. I found that it helped me figure out what I have and think about why I'm keeping some books. It also led to some neat discoveries about certain books. I found a couple that had been signed that I'd never realized had been signed!
Call up the nearest college or university with a library science program. Ask them for the names of students specializing in curation and cataloging. Contacts the students and tell them how much money you have, how many books you want to catalog, and arrange for them to take care of it.
I have about 5,000 books. I just sat down with a spreadsheet and entered the particulars for every one like any librarian in existence over the last 2000 years would do. I did this over a few months with 1-8 hours of effort in a burst.
A lot of things still have no quick and automated solution.
When I'm doing accounting and financial analysis, it's still primarily a numbers grind of data entry, cross checking and analysis.
Actually getting the book info from the ISBN was very time consuming, I didn't know about Library Thing.
You can almost certainly use a smartphone, but that will be a lot slower, comes with the risk of dropping it and then you don't have a bar code scanner left over for other projects.
It seems that people have favourites but there is nothing leading the charge. I know someone that has a barcode reader and wrote ee's own code to parse it for a database, even printing personal barcodes to handle repeats (sentimental value, different format).
I think ISBNs sometimes are different soft vs hard, BUT ISBNs are new and sometimes get reused, plus the barcode might be for a category or "book/zine of series" and not a particular copy.
I know Amazon, and thus goodreads, can now do search by cover - it is amazon, but it does avoid a lot of issues. Goodreads might be best for you just for phone and cover scanning. It is, however, slow. You can use shelves/tags for locations but it is ... slow.
I think the best system would be a combo of cover scanning, cataloging your photo in the entry, and notes of signed/writen notes. BUT for location tying it to a barcode reader that can scan the new shelf's barcode and the book, but that requires personally barcoding books (please use removable stickers!) and is a bit over involved.
Personally, the weird case I really want and am not sure how to peice together is a way to pull good spine photos/digitals. I know mu books by spine so I'd love to see if a book catalog could have a spine database and be used to make a virtual library.
edit: Found the thread. Last I read it did not have anything particularly good, but a few workable options. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817219
1. Scan book ISBN via a standard barcode reader (in keyboard emulation mode) [1]
2. The barcode reader 'types' in the ISBN into the GUI of my homebrew app along with a new-line character.
3. The app takes this ISBN and searches Amazon via it's API, then parses the results. If there's more than 1 result it just picks the first one (which is 99% correct), if it's not correct there's an option to override or enter details manually.
4. The app then queries the amazon API again for the book details, and places them all into a record in a SQL DB.
5. For reasons I can't quite remember the app also goes to the actual product page of the book on Amazon and grabs the high resolution picture of the book cover (which only some times matches the edition of the book we actually own) and stores that locally.
6. There's a web app for searching the DB that we use when we can't remember which books we actually own (first world problems!)
7. Any new book that enters the house is catalogued BEFORE it is even allowed in the Library.
It's a basic set-up, but other than the Amazon API, which is abstracted via my own functions, it's not dependant on any other (closed or FOSS) book management software.
---
[1] A cheap one like this will do it: https://amzn.to/3CyqaAC
https://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_...
I have 3 tall bookshelves of books but don’t really feel the need to catalogue them. I sort them by topic and sometimes physical size and it seems fine.
You could also check out some of the tooling and APIs around openlibrary.org. Unfortunately, I think it's basically a moribund project, but may have sufficient tools for your needs. I know they have a list feature, but I don't think ingestion is particularly easy; nor am I sure of the import/export functionality around their lists.
edit: I'd forgotten about librarything (mentioned in another comment). They have better tooling that openlibrary.
[0] - https://cdlib.org/services/pad/massdig/mass-digitization-his...
This threshold was reached a few years ago, so who knows how many books I have now. Everything else in that app works spectacularly fine, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Disclaimer: I made the app. Happy to give free promo codes to anyone interested in trying and give feedback!
I used a simple Excel macro for data capture and lookup. Basically when a cell changed (book was scanned) it would request the book data from outpan.com. If outpan didn't know the upc beep and return to the cell, otherwise decode the response (json) and populate the spreadsheet row.
Here's the excel macro (why I used the B column instead of the A column is a longer story):
Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
If Target.Cells.Count <> 1 Then
Exit Sub
End If
If Application.Intersect(Range("B2:B99999"), Range(Target.Address)) Is Nothing Then
Exit Sub
End If
Dim Ean
Ean = CStr(Target.value)
Dim Url
Url = "https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/" + Ean + "?apikey=[haha get your own key haha]"
Dim HttpRequest
Set HttpRequest = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")
HttpRequest.Open "GET", Url, False
HttpRequest.Send
Set json = New VbsJson
Set o = json.Decode(HttpRequest.ResponseText)
If Not IsEmpty(o("error")) Then
Beep
ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
Else
booktitle = o("name")
If IsNull(booktitle) Then
Beep
ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
Else
If IsVarArrayEmpty(o("attributes")) Then
Author = ""
PublishedOn = ""
Else
If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Author(s)")) Then
Author = ""
Else
Author = o("attributes")("Author(s)")
End If
If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Publication Date")) Then
PublishedOn = ""
Else
PublishedOn = o("attributes")("Publication Date")
End If
End If
Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column - 1).value = Cells(Target.Row - 1, Target.Column - 1).value
Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 1).value = booktitle
Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 2).value = Author
Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 3).value = PublishedOn
End If
End If
End Sub
Function IsVarArrayEmpty(anArray As Variant)
Dim i As Integer
If IsObject(anArray) Then
IsVarArrayEmpty = False
Else
On Error Resume Next
i = UBound(anArray, 1)
If Err.Number = 0 Then
If i < 0 Then
IsVarArrayEmpty = True
Else
IsVarArrayEmpty = False
End If
Else
IsVarArrayEmpty = True
End If
End If
End Function
edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.
1) How long did it take for you to collect all of them?
2) What are the books mostly centered on? tech? polticis? fiction?
3) Do you happen to know whats your read? and to be read stat?
From there it would take a few hours of playing with the data to get it in whichever form you prefer
and then you can query goodreads or amazon to find the actual book
1. Make a snapshot of a secondhand book store's online inventory.
2. Sell all the books to them.
3. Diff the inventory.
4. Buy them all back.
Voila!
From a US perspective (may apply elsewhere), for books published relatively recently (within the last ~20 years or so), the ISBN is often part of the barcode on the back of the book (ISBN-13s (the updated standard) start with 978, so this is a good clue that the barcode is an ISBN). For a period of time prior to that (and perhaps still applicable to Mass Market Paperbacks), there is a barcode on the back that is NOT an ISBN, but there is an ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. I've not discovered any systematic way to pull an ISBN out of a non-ISBN barcode (though I haven't dug too far -- my collection hasn't reached 4 digits yet and I've been happy to type when scanning wasn't an option).
Once you have the ISBNs, I like to query against the Open Library API [2], which is a part of the Internet Archive. The information in there is fairly robust, if inconsistent (the capitalization of titles is sometimes as printed on the title page, sometimes Library of Congress format, other minor things). They have a lot of data points available, such as cross-referenced IDs with Goodreads and LibraryThing, but again, this is community-supported data, so YMMV as to completeness or accuracy.
Another note -- many books have separate ISBNs for hardcover editions, trade paperback editions, mass market editions, eBooks, etc (and sometimes don't have an ISBN at all for things like Book of the Month Club editions). I don't know if this is a requirement, or a luxury that big publishers have, but it is something I've noticed (you'll sometimes see multiple ISBNs listed on the copyright page, along with their formats -- also you may see related editions on Indiebound [3], along with their ISBNs). A cursory glance at Open Library doesn't seem to have a data point distinction for this (which is unfortunate), so you may still have to note this, but theoretically it may be possible to get this information from the ISBN directly at some point.
Source for ^^: I read a lot, have a lot of books, briefly ran a (failed) specialized online bookstore, and wrote a CLI tool [4] for myself to solve this very issue.
[1]: https://qrbot.net/locale/en/ [2]: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books [3]: https://www.indiebound.org/ [4]: https://github.com/winsbe01/booki
Hint: it’s not manual and it’s completely automated.