Weekend project: Scan your books into Google

The official Google Books blog has a fun post on how to scan your books into the service's "My Books" feature by using a USB barcode scanner. The My Books section of Google Books is similar to the popular Mac application Delicious Library in letting you keep a list of all your titles in a digital card catalog that can be shared with others. Of course you can do this without the USB barcode scanner simply by searching for the book, but Google's Matt Cutts makes it look like fun:

As Cutts mentions in the video, one of the benefits of building up your Google Books library is that you can limit in-text searches to just the titles you own. Not mentioned, however, is that it's a great way to build up a personal effects value estimate for insurance purposes.

Having recently given away an entire bookshelf while doing some spring cleaning, using a system like this would have made it easier to keep track of all of the things I've read throughout my life. This is something that the Kindle and other e-book readers can provide for future generations of readers without as much elbow grease.

If you don't feel like giving all that personal information to Google you can also use some other Web services to do this, including Shelfari, GoodReads, and Library Thing. However Google's big ISBN entry screen is the most barcode-friendly of the bunch.

[squealingrat]

I would like to point out that LIbraryThing.com also offers this service, and INSTEAD of buying a seventy dollar barcode reader, you can buy a CueCat scanner (essentially the same thing), from LibraryThing for 15.

[ikramerica--2008]

or just type in the codes. they aren't that long. but I guess if you want to do hundreds or thousands of books at once, it's a tad tedious.

[JoanLP]

You are wrong that this is good for insurance purposes. Simply scanning in a barcode tells nothing about the book's condition, and condition is paramount in determining value.

And, of course, it's absolutely useless for those of us who have books sans barcodes and/or ISBNs.

[bubazoo]

whats so neat about scanning in a books barcode? At first when I read the article, I thought you were talking about scanning in whole books into the computer. That is always good, because that helps us a great deal, those of us with visual or print disabilities. Most books still aren't in an accessible format that most of us can read, especially college book material, and they don't want to do anything about it due to copyright issues, which is stupid because thats not what copyright means. Copyright means another author can't republish an authors work as their own, all we're talking about is making books into an accessible format that all can enjoy. for even the blind and dyslexic would be willing to purchase the books directly from the reseller, if the reseller would be willing to publish the books in a format that blind and dyslexics could read. I think the publishers just don't care, and I think their the ones loosing out on that potential sale.

[Police_States_of_America]

i would be more interested to see google roll out a program that lets you send in books in return for (DRM-free) ebooks. they could then recycle the paper from the old books and we can have a pristine digital copy of a book we bought, without needing to purchase it again.

[iTrackmine]

You forgot iTrackmine.com. I use a $10 cuecat (get from cuecats.com) and have full mobile access to everything I own (books, movies, music, wine, electronics, games, et-al) while I'm in the store. And a whole slew of unique and USEFUL features and tools.

iTrackmine also has all the details you need for insurance (avg. price, price you paid, where you bought, etc). And full social capabilities so you can know what you want and have, your friends want and have, and swap stuff, recommended gifts (with what they already own filtered out), etc...it's a lot more robust and rich than anything else.