alexist

Aside from sleeping too much, not eating properly and not going out. But hey. Going to Greenwich tomorrow apparently (tomorrow's the teams part of the bridge, so Neil and his dad aren't playing). They are playing Monday, and I think I'll make the effort to go out. At the very least I have to get some more case cleaner for my laptop and the New Yorker.

I finally got sick of having my books catalogued in an Excel file and decided to investigate book-cataloguing software. Google turned up a few potential candidates and off I went to play with them.

Bookpedia is promising. Easy interface and a rather nifty feature that uses the iSight as an OCR tool. Hold up the barcode, it scans in the ISBN, and retrieves the information from Amazon. Positioning the book correctly takes a little fiddling, but after that all is well. (Mostly: It barfed on the ISBN from Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black. No idea why; searching by title on Amazon UK worked perfectly.)

The trouble begins when you don't have the book handy (remember, I have 13 boxes in storage). The search feature is pants. (Book Database X is no better.) It's a simple keyword search and each result has to be paged through individually. What it SHOULD have is a full form where you can fill in the details available. This way, you can ONLY get Emma by Jane Austen, rather than searching for "jane austen emma" and getting books ABOUT Jane Austen's Emma.

Because all results are linked to ISBN, it turns up specific editions. And here comes the OCD headache: You start searching through the results to try to find the specific edition you have. (This is made even worse by the fact that images are available.) I have enough sense to know that I will never turn up exact images for my battered secondhand paperbacks (some of which actually have list prices in shillings and pence) but it's somewhat frustrating when they're relatively recent editions. Also, since I have books bought in two countries I keep having to restrict searches to either the UK or the US to get the correct edition.

The alternative, of course, is to search Amazon for the ISBN yourself and put that in, which lets you use Amazon's somewhat better interface (and Amazon's searches seem slightly smarter too); but that's rather fiddly.

So far I've inputted 97 books. Out of, ooh, 700... :/ (And I haven't even gotten to the textbooks. I can foresee having to find the ISBN myself on those.)

Me: "I've spent the past 3 hours redoing my book database with new software."
Neil: "That's nice, dear."
Me: "Yeah, it's really neat, it uses my iSight to scan the bar codes and then retrieves the data from Amazon."
Neil: "Oh. My. God."

(ETA: Have done 550 books. A few will have to be done manually as they're religious books Amazon has never heard of. A few don't even have ISBNs!)