Ask HN: quality (open preferred) book indexing software?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058482I have two walls of bookshelves filled with books I've collected over the years. I'm a bit of a book hoarder, so any subject I come across that I find interesting usually ends up with a book purchased. I have well over five hundred at this point.
Problem is, our house is rather small, and my wife is interested in reclaiming her breakfast room (aka my office).
Ideally, diybookscanner.org would be farther along and I'd scan them all to files. I'd give just about anything to have digital versions of all these books. Sadly, I don't think it's possible or feasible in my time frame.
So, I play to buy a shed, place my books in plastic, labeled bins, and store them away. The problem is, I'm a technologist and developer, and I can never be sure what books I'll need on a given night. I think I can keep a 5-10 book rotation going and be ok, but I need to be able to find and retrieve the books quickly.
Years ago, when I had a few of the misguided but cool CueCats, there were a few projects out there to let you scan a book's bar code, retrieve its data from Amazon, and store it in a database. I'm hoping some of you can point me to similar solutions today. Ideally, it'll let me scan the barcode, retrieve and store the book's data, and tag it in certain ways (Bin A, Bin B, etc). It'd also have decent search capabilities.
Finally, I'll need either a way to use my iPhone as the barcode reader itself, or suggestions for an affordable reader I can purchase.
Thanks for any help you can provide!