![]() ![]() When Bookpedia reads the code, there is an audible “beep” and a window pops up pre-filled with information from internet book databases like Amazon. Using the built in camera, I can hold up the ISBN bar code. The program allowed me to set up my Library and use a checkbox “Sold” for books I am donating and/or selling. There are too many new titles on my Wish List!īookpedia and the iSight camera on my new iMac have made relatively quick work of a big task. I am always trying to remember, “Have I read that before?” and I was tired of buying duplicate copies. I didn’t want to move along old books until I had cataloged them in some way. My major roadblock to previously cleaning up my books was rooted in good old sentimentality. With another half hour or so for re-shelving, I am beginning to see progress. I’ve been chipping away at the stacks for the past week and this morning cataloged 71 books in just over an hour. I have one wall of bookcases that were double-stacked with books from my past and present lives as student, teacher, writer, researcher, and reader. Bookpedia book cataloging software is helping me tame the monster in my home office. But it does work, and the integrated iOS and MacOS apps and web exporting make it handy to use on all our devices.Most Januarys I get a surge of energy to whip my chaos into shape. (And Michael Palin’s HIMALAYA is in the Office on 6-6).īookpedia has some shortcomings. The whole shelving system is a grid, and Bruji tells me that Eric Valli’s stunning photo book, HIMALAYA, is on shelf 3-4 - meaning, column 3 from the left, row 4 from the bottom. It doesn’t really matter how the books are organized, because I can query Bookpedia, go to that shelf, and find it fast enough.īecause we live in a loft, we built a whole wall system, about 18 feet high, in which the books are grouped by color (which does help me: I remember the color of most of my books pretty well), and we push the books to the back so that knickknacks can be piled in front. Bruji searches through a list of international databases (from Amazon to the Library of Congress and other z39.50 servers), and with a little extra help from Bing or Google image search you can usually find the best cover image and resolve the cataloging bits in a minute or two per book. ![]() Well, until that bit of imaging/AI/webwork is implemented, it’s easy enough to peck in the titles myself. Hey, wouldn’t it be great if you could capture your whole library the way Jeff Martin did with the Strahov Monastery, by shooting a gigapixel image and then using a bit of smart image analysis code to grok all the book spines, index the room, and be able to zoom into each book in the image, click on it, and read a digitized copy on the web? And then I can go through a shelf and add each book by looking up title/author bits. So, I use my iPhone (running iOS 6+) to take a panoramic photo of each shelf, swiping it slowly across so that all the book spines can be read. If your books are new, just scan the ISBN barcodes with the iPhone, zipping through as fast as you can wrangle the books. To build the catalog, we scan a shelf at a time, and add a “Location” field to note which physical shelf it is (e.g., “Upstairs 1-4 is bookcase 1, shelf 4”). Both will get you the book’s cover image and catalog information. There are two methods of input: you can scan a book’s ISBN barcode with the iPhone running Pocketpedia or, you can search for the book (any bit of author/title/ISBN/description), and then resolve the right result. A companion iPhone app, Pocketpedia, syncs with the database so you can keep your whole library catalog handy. Bookpedia runs on a Mac and keeps a database that’s easy to share across your machines, or export in various ways (e.g., put all of your library’s book covers on browsable web pages). We use Bookpedia, by, to index our library. In fact it can be a problem with only a few hundred books. When your home library swells to 3,000 volumes (as ours has), finding a book can be a problem. ![]()
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