I love that he showed the computer’s screen and showed an “action shot” of scanning the books. Special thanks to Michael ‘Wysz’ Wyszomierski for recording and producing this video. Delicious Library 2 is $40 commercial software for the Mac that can use your Mac’s built-in webcam. The app lets you access all of it for free. It boasts a library of over one million titles ranging from movies to books. And please note: this isn’t the only way to scan your books. Hoopla Digital is one of the most powerful library apps on Android. Once you have your book list, there are social networks for book lovers such as Goodreads and LibraryThing. Wouldn’t it be great if you could upload your list of books to Amazon, and it would automatically suggest other books you should read? Or avoid suggesting books that you already own? Josh Lowensohn mentions another great reason to do this: it creates a record for insurance purposes. But I didn’t have this device, not tested yet. Down the road, I can easily imagine other uses. Android 9 support device manufactures, it can push third party library in system/lib. That’s right: just by scanning bar codes, you can search over the text of books you own. Why would you record which books you own in the first place? The immediate reason is that you can run full-text searches against the books in your library. With that, adding your books to Google’s My Library feature is simplicity itself–the Google Books team has tweaked the workflow so that you can barcode scan and add lots of books very quickly. I’m sure you can get barcode scanners for cheaper (anyone remember the CueCat scanner that was free?), but the Adesso had good reviews. Well, there’s a neat hack for this too: Amazon carries the Adesso NuScan 1000 bar code scanner for $65.44 with free shipping. Why install software at all when a website will store the data for you? The only problem was how to tell Google which books I own. The suggestion was so obvious that I smacked my head. Last year I suggested potential Summer of Code projects and one of my favorite suggestions was “How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?” In the blog comments, Colin Colehour left an excellent comment: “Matt, Can’t you use Google Books to keep track of your book library at home? You can add books that you own to the ‘my library’ list and then export that as an xml file and they have RSS feeds.” (Okay, if TechCrunch wrote about my video then I should probably at least do a blog post too.)
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