Ask HN: How do I easily catalog a couple thousand physical books?

ISBN is also not guaranteed to be a primary key. It's designed to serve the needs of new book sellers. If a book goes out of print the publisher can reissue the same ISBN to a new book. It's unusual, but South End Press notably was resentful about paying for new blocks of ISBN numbers and recycled ISBNs to "stick it to the man".

Some books have an ISBN barcode on them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Nu...

but you don't want to waste time with a "cheap" barcode reader made in China and sold on EBay. I have played around with those and find that they read barcodes when they feel like reading barcodes and it is quicker to type the codes in.

I prefer LibraryThing to Goodreads because LibraryThing focuses more on cataloging than social features. Their team also builds software for actual libraries. They source book data from almost 5,000 external sources so it's easy to map ISBN information with the correct edition and cover. You can also get your data out pretty easily, they offer exports in multiple formats.

EDIT: For most books, you can scan the barcode on the back to get the ISBN. Mass market paperbacks seem to usually have separate UPCs. The ISBN barcode is often located on the reverse side of the front cover, so you want to scan that one instead of the one on the back.

You could also check out some of the tooling and APIs around openlibrary.org. Unfortunately, I think it's basically a moribund project, but may have sufficient tools for your needs. I know they have a list feature, but I don't think ingestion is particularly easy; nor am I sure of the import/export functionality around their lists.

edit: I'd forgotten about librarything (mentioned in another comment). They have better tooling that openlibrary.

[1] https://www.libib.com

I've used this (Android) barcode scanner before: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sukronmoh....

On Calibre, simply go to "Add Books" > "Add books by ISBN", and paste a list of ISBNS. It will automatically download metadata and images for them.

But to be honest, I've always found cataloging and data entry to be a lot of fun, and there's something meditative about entering a book's title, date, author, ISBN, etc. into a system. I found that it helped me figure out what I have and think about why I'm keeping some books. It also led to some neat discoveries about certain books. I found a couple that had been signed that I'd never realized had been signed!

From a US perspective (may apply elsewhere), for books published relatively recently (within the last ~20 years or so), the ISBN is often part of the barcode on the back of the book (ISBN-13s (the updated standard) start with 978, so this is a good clue that the barcode is an ISBN). For a period of time prior to that (and perhaps still applicable to Mass Market Paperbacks), there is a barcode on the back that is NOT an ISBN, but there is an ISBN barcode on the inside front cover. I've not discovered any systematic way to pull an ISBN out of a non-ISBN barcode (though I haven't dug too far -- my collection hasn't reached 4 digits yet and I've been happy to type when scanning wasn't an option).

Once you have the ISBNs, I like to query against the Open Library API [2], which is a part of the Internet Archive. The information in there is fairly robust, if inconsistent (the capitalization of titles is sometimes as printed on the title page, sometimes Library of Congress format, other minor things). They have a lot of data points available, such as cross-referenced IDs with Goodreads and LibraryThing, but again, this is community-supported data, so YMMV as to completeness or accuracy.

Another note -- many books have separate ISBNs for hardcover editions, trade paperback editions, mass market editions, eBooks, etc (and sometimes don't have an ISBN at all for things like Book of the Month Club editions). I don't know if this is a requirement, or a luxury that big publishers have, but it is something I've noticed (you'll sometimes see multiple ISBNs listed on the copyright page, along with their formats -- also you may see related editions on Indiebound [3], along with their ISBNs). A cursory glance at Open Library doesn't seem to have a data point distinction for this (which is unfortunate), so you may still have to note this, but theoretically it may be possible to get this information from the ISBN directly at some point.

Source for ^^: I read a lot, have a lot of books, briefly ran a (failed) specialized online bookstore, and wrote a CLI tool [4] for myself to solve this very issue.

[1]: https://qrbot.net/locale/en/ [2]: https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books [3]: https://www.indiebound.org/ [4]: https://github.com/winsbe01/booki

LibraryThing's mobile app will scan barcodes just fine.

The gotcha is that mass-market paperback before sometime in the 80s (I probably have the date wrong) do not have the ISBN in them. These will need to be entered manually (not to bad with the mobile app which has a dedicated ISBN keyboard). It can also look up by the LOC catalog number (which is not the call number but rather a consecutively assigned number which can be found on the copyright page of books published starting some time in the 1960s).

ISBN, by the way, will tell you the format of the book. Paperback and hardcover books have separate ISBNs.

Disclaimer: I made the app. Happy to give free promo codes to anyone interested in trying and give feedback!

Actually getting the book info from the ISBN was very time consuming, I didn't know about Library Thing.

You can almost certainly use a smartphone, but that will be a lot slower, comes with the risk of dropping it and then you don't have a bar code scanner left over for other projects.

First, close the library (or library section) until your work is complete. It's critical that the books not go wandering or get rearranged during this process.

Next, grab an SLR (or equivalent mirrorless) camera with video mode. Set it to video mode. In good lighting, play it over the shelves, one by one, from left to right. Slowly.

Make sure the spines are all legible. This is your set-of-books.

Set yourself or someone else up transcribing the titles from the recording, in the order shelved. Check it a couple of times. If you missed a book, or couldn't read the spine from the recording, add it here.

Once you are certain your list is accurate and complete, print (or put on your phone) the list of books. (Still in the order shelved.)

Now, again, working top-down, left-to-right, take books out in sets of eight. (I like eight because it's a nice round number, it's near miller's magic number, and it's also a number of books I can typically carry.)

For each 'byte' of eight books, take your SLR and, in photo mode, take a pic of the frontmatter page of that book -- the one containing the date of publication, and, most critically, the ISBN.

Put the eight books back on the shelf and take another eight. Repeat until complete. Be sure not to miss a book.

Now you have a list of books and a set of pics. Guess what? They are the same length and in the same order. So, book 1 on your list is the first pic on your SLR. And so on.

Now, you can OCR those pics for the ISBN. As backup/redundancy you can grab other info as well, e.g. publisher, etc. to sanity-check the results of your ISBN lookup.

Congratulations, you now have enough information -- a title and and ISBN -- for e.g. Google Books to pull up the rest of the info, which you can sanity check against the other deets you OCRed out of the frontmatter page.

Final tip: Calibre has a book information lookup thingy; it wasn't what I used back in the day, but AFAIK it should work great. It may be possible for you to simply populate the Calibre book list with titles and ISBNs, and have it just magically whisk other details -- date of publication etc. -- into the appropriate fields. Again, you can cross-check these (either exhaustively or spot-check) against the OCRed contents of the frontmatter pages, which (again) you associated with a book title in the initial step.

Happy librarianing!

and then you can query goodreads or amazon to find the actual book

From there it would take a few hours of playing with the data to get it in whichever form you prefer

https://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_...

I have 3 tall bookshelves of books but don’t really feel the need to catalogue them. I sort them by topic and sometimes physical size and it seems fine.

I used a simple Excel macro for data capture and lookup. Basically when a cell changed (book was scanned) it would request the book data from outpan.com. If outpan didn't know the upc beep and return to the cell, otherwise decode the response (json) and populate the spreadsheet row.

Here's the excel macro (why I used the B column instead of the A column is a longer story):

    Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
        If Target.Cells.Count <> 1 Then
            Exit Sub
        End If
        
        If Application.Intersect(Range("B2:B99999"), Range(Target.Address)) Is Nothing Then
            Exit Sub
        End If
        
        Dim Ean
        Ean = CStr(Target.value)
        
        Dim Url
        Url = "https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/" + Ean + "?apikey=[haha get your own key haha]"
    
        Dim HttpRequest
        Set HttpRequest = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")
        HttpRequest.Open "GET", Url, False
        HttpRequest.Send
            
        Set json = New VbsJson
        Set o = json.Decode(HttpRequest.ResponseText)
        If Not IsEmpty(o("error")) Then
            Beep
            ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
        Else
            booktitle = o("name")
            If IsNull(booktitle) Then
                Beep
                ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select
            Else
                If IsVarArrayEmpty(o("attributes")) Then
                    Author = ""
                    PublishedOn = ""
                Else
                    If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Author(s)")) Then
                        Author = ""
                    Else
                        Author = o("attributes")("Author(s)")
                    End If
                    If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Publication Date")) Then
                        PublishedOn = ""
                    Else
                        PublishedOn = o("attributes")("Publication Date")
                    End If
                End If
                
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column - 1).value = Cells(Target.Row - 1, Target.Column - 1).value
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 1).value = booktitle
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 2).value = Author
                Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 3).value = PublishedOn
            End If
        End If
    End Sub
    
    
    Function IsVarArrayEmpty(anArray As Variant)
        Dim i As Integer
        If IsObject(anArray) Then
            IsVarArrayEmpty = False
        Else
            On Error Resume Next
            i = UBound(anArray, 1)
            If Err.Number = 0 Then
                If i < 0 Then
                    IsVarArrayEmpty = True
                Else
                    IsVarArrayEmpty = False
                End If
            Else
                IsVarArrayEmpty = True
            End If
        End If
    End Function

edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.