Collectionz

For those of you that know us, you know that everyone in my family is an inveterate reader.  One of the more unfortunate consequences of this is that we have a TON of books.  The front office in our house, the bonus room over the garage, and Daniel's old bedroom are all given over to books, my guess is that we have two or three thousand of them.

For Fathers day this year, Valorie got me a Flic Barcode scanner and some software from Collectorz.  The Flic barcode scanner is a small handheld scanner with memory for about 500 UPC codes, combined with Collectorz movie, book and music collector, it has the ability to categorize all our collections.

Initially I sort-of ignored it, but last night at about 10:00, Valorie reminded me of it.  I installed the software and played around with it a bit.  And a bit more.  And still some more.

Darn, I had never thought that I'd spend two and a half hours (with Valorie) running around pulling books from the library trying to find ones that the program wouldn't find.  And I've got to say, it did a remarkable job.  Except for the hundred or so books that pre-date bar-codes (I still have the very first book I ever purchased (Checkpoint Lambda by Murray Leinster), it did a remarkable job. 

Essentially the software reads the data off the barcode, then datamines off of a bunch of sites to build the database, including Amazon.com, B&N.com, Powells.com, the Library of Congress, imdb (for movies), etc.  It's actually pretty cool.

Again, this is just first impressions - one tricky bit is that the barcode on the back of the book often isn't the ISBN, which screws up the database lookup, but that's really not the fault of the software.

Anyway, it's a cool toy :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2006
  I wrote my own for a CueCat.
  
  One thing you may notice is that there are books which have conflicting information between Amazon and LOC -- and at times both are incorrect.
  

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2006
  You forgot to mention the "Oh, Wow!" part: it finds images of most of the books to show you what the front cover looks like.
  
  The moviez one also downloads all the imdb stuff so you can browse the information for collection.
  
  I think the "loaned" feature might come in handy in the future. If we make people use it, maybe we'll know who keeps taking books of the shelves and leaving them all over the house ;-)
  

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2006
  http://www.delicious-monster.com/
  
  Wait... you're not using a mac. Sorry. :P
  
  Glad to hear you're having a good experience though. :)

• Anonymous
  August 08, 2006
  he he, was just thinking WHAT... your first book was about the Checkpoint firewall.......After following the link I’m happy to see that it's a sci-fi book and that you after all are normal like us others Grins Think my first bought book, that I can remember, was Dune by Frank Herbert.
  

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2006
  Larry,
  
  Thanks for the link. I've got a pretty extensive library (4K+ books), as well as a DVD collection (250 or so).
  
  I've been thinking about writing my own app to catalog them; this looks perfect, though, and for the price is much more cost-effective.
  
  Ken

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2006
  If you are serious into books, check this meta-search tool out!
  
  http://www.addall.com/
  
  It's designed for bargain hunters, but sometimes it finds ISBNs that Amazon doesn't list!

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2006
  Andrew Plotkin wrote up details about his book scaning project, using his own Python scripts to retrieve details via the web about each scanned book:
  
  http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/
  
  In his description, he talks about books with EANs versus the
  now obsolete 12-digit UPC. By scanning both codes on books where both are available, he built up a mapping from UPC manufacturer codes to book publisher numbers in the EAN, which could then be used on books that only have the old 12-digit UPC.
  

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2006
  PingBack from http://blog.junqbox.com/articles/2006/08/11/getting-data-in

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2006
  I'm glad you find our software useful, Larry. Must be a relief for your wife as well, considering it was her gift :)
  
  Anyway, for the interested Mac reader: we do have Mac editions of Music, Movie and Book Collector as well.
  
  Enjoy the program; let us know if you have any further questions or suggestions.
  
  Mark-Jan Harte
  Collectorz.com

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2006
  Hi Larry, thanks for your lovely review. It's always nice to hear from a happy collector. I especially liked the idea of you and Valerie running around with hard-to-find books :-) and Book Collector just doing it's job.
  I've added your post to our review section, just follow the posted URL.
  Happy collecting from us at Collectorz.com!

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2006
  Andrew Plotkin wrote up an essay on his book scanning project, using his own homegrown Python tools to retrieve the book information:
  
  http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/
  
  He ingeniously handled the mapping from the manufacturer in the UPC code to the appropriate book publisher in the ISBN by scanning both the EAN and UPC in books that had them both, and thereby building up the mapping that could then be used for books that only had a traditional 12-digit UPC.
  

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2006
  Andrew Plotkin wrote up an essay on his book scanning project, using his own homegrown Python tools to retrieve the book information:
  
  http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/
  
  He ingeniously handled the mapping from the manufacturer in the UPC code to the appropriate book publisher in the ISBN by scanning both the EAN and UPC in books that had them both, and thereby building up the mapping that could then be used for books that only had a traditional 12-digit UPC.
  

• Anonymous
  August 17, 2006
  Delicious Library, from Seattle-ite Wil Shipley and Delicious Monster, is awesome.  It performs image recognition on the barcode using Apple's iSight camera (which is now built into their laptops and iMac), but also supports a laser barcode scanner.
  
  One downfall is it can't find Xenocide and Children of the Mind using the barcode. I had to type in the ISBN numbers to find them.
  
  

• Anonymous
  August 18, 2006
  a barcoder printing software can make things easier!
  
  such as " SmartCodeStudio", it 's Industry-leading label design, barcode and printing software.
  
  http://www.sharewarecheap.com/business-finance-inventory-systems/smartcodestudio-professional-edition11986-1.htm

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2006
  Here's a ruby script to convert EANs to ISBNs
  
  http://entropicprincipal.blogspot.com/2006/02/convert-eans-to-isbns-in-ruby.html

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2008
  Those of you who know me (and my family) from beyond my blog know that among my our many passions, one

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2008
  Those of you who know me (and my family) from beyond my blog know that among my our many passions, one

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