Webcam + Computer + Books = Magic
Feb. 10th, 2007 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerNow that I'm home I'm trying to catch up on all the projects and promises of six months ago, one of which involved taking several boxes of surplus books from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tamaranth on the basis that I'd try and sell them for her. Looking at the boxes in the garage, I was contemplating making a list for eBay or the like, and then had a thought.
Whilst I was awaybugshaw got a webcam so that we could have the odd chat-with-pictures. I remembered hearing about book-cataloguing software that could use a webcam to read the barcode on the back of a book and pull the book's data off Amazon or the Library of Congress. All I'd need to do is get the webcam working on my Mac and find a suitable application to run it with.
The former was a bit of a headache, as B's webcam was a generic USB one rather than the Mac-preferred iSight. By downloading some open-source drivers I got a picture, but a very jerky and sporadic one. It turns out that although my PowerMac G5 has four USB ports, it only has two USB buses, so I ended up needing an extension lead to plug it into one of the sockets at the back so that the Webcam wasn't sharing a bus with anything else, from which point it worked fine.
So, on to software. A bit of googling suggested two alternatives: Delicious Library and Booxter. Both let you download evaluation versions limited to a couple of dozen or so books, so I set them up for a quick comparison. Delicious Library certainly looks a bit nicer, and its barcode recognition seems slightly more reliable. Booxter is a bit plainer, and seems to have trouble with some barcodes (mainly older US books) but it looks at a wider range of sources for book data, and is $20 to register against DL's $40. Both did a very good job of recognising books, and both offered quick ISBN search for books without barcodes. In the end the extra prettiness of DL didn't quite justify paying twice what Booxter cost to register, so I went for the latter.
But - and this is pretty much the point of this post - just trying both of them gave me one of those silly-grin moments. You wave the back cover of a book in front of the webcam, the computer goes ping and the display shows a little icon of the book cover with title, author, year, page-count and half a dozen more bits of data. It took me about five minutes to catalogue most of two boxes of books, plus a couple more to enter the details of those old enough not to have barcodes. When I first played with Google Earth I commented that this Dork Tower pretty much summed up my reaction; well, it was that all over again. This (and GPS-enabled palmtops) is what we had the digital revolution for.
Oh, and although I didn't plump for Delicious Library in the end, I did manage to find its Easter Egg - a little extra thrown in if a couple of keywords crop up in a book title. One of my test titles waskarentraviss's Hard Contact; now, DL actually reads out your titles as you scan them, and what I got was:
'Republic Commando'
'Hard Contact'
'Star Wars'
(pause)
"I am your father..."
tamaranth on the basis that I'd try and sell them for her. Looking at the boxes in the garage, I was contemplating making a list for eBay or the like, and then had a thought.Whilst I was away
bugshaw got a webcam so that we could have the odd chat-with-pictures. I remembered hearing about book-cataloguing software that could use a webcam to read the barcode on the back of a book and pull the book's data off Amazon or the Library of Congress. All I'd need to do is get the webcam working on my Mac and find a suitable application to run it with.The former was a bit of a headache, as B's webcam was a generic USB one rather than the Mac-preferred iSight. By downloading some open-source drivers I got a picture, but a very jerky and sporadic one. It turns out that although my PowerMac G5 has four USB ports, it only has two USB buses, so I ended up needing an extension lead to plug it into one of the sockets at the back so that the Webcam wasn't sharing a bus with anything else, from which point it worked fine.
So, on to software. A bit of googling suggested two alternatives: Delicious Library and Booxter. Both let you download evaluation versions limited to a couple of dozen or so books, so I set them up for a quick comparison. Delicious Library certainly looks a bit nicer, and its barcode recognition seems slightly more reliable. Booxter is a bit plainer, and seems to have trouble with some barcodes (mainly older US books) but it looks at a wider range of sources for book data, and is $20 to register against DL's $40. Both did a very good job of recognising books, and both offered quick ISBN search for books without barcodes. In the end the extra prettiness of DL didn't quite justify paying twice what Booxter cost to register, so I went for the latter.
But - and this is pretty much the point of this post - just trying both of them gave me one of those silly-grin moments. You wave the back cover of a book in front of the webcam, the computer goes ping and the display shows a little icon of the book cover with title, author, year, page-count and half a dozen more bits of data. It took me about five minutes to catalogue most of two boxes of books, plus a couple more to enter the details of those old enough not to have barcodes. When I first played with Google Earth I commented that this Dork Tower pretty much summed up my reaction; well, it was that all over again. This (and GPS-enabled palmtops) is what we had the digital revolution for.
Oh, and although I didn't plump for Delicious Library in the end, I did manage to find its Easter Egg - a little extra thrown in if a couple of keywords crop up in a book title. One of my test titles was
karentraviss's Hard Contact; now, DL actually reads out your titles as you scan them, and what I got was:'Republic Commando'
'Hard Contact'
'Star Wars'
(pause)
"I am your father..."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 09:01 pm (UTC)That reminds me...
Date: 2007-02-10 10:04 pm (UTC)Re: That reminds me...
Date: 2007-02-10 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 12:03 am (UTC)And I would have ended up with something other than DL as well, but it does CDs and other media which was important for me.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 09:00 am (UTC)Aardvark, I haven't catalogued the CDs. Why not? Because I have a massive, lovingly constructed, catalogue of my music in iTunes, and I'm buggered if I'm cataloguing it *again*. Next version of DL will probably import from iTunes. It better had.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 03:42 pm (UTC)Oh, and there's the games and DVDs as well.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 10:57 am (UTC)