That’s the number of books in our collection at the moment. Kate went nuts with a bar-code scanner, and entered them all into LibraryThing. Well, OK, that’s just the stuff at home– it doesn’t include the textbooks I keep in my office, or the maybe twenty science-related books I keep in there for extra reading material.
Still, a lot of books, now browsable on the Web.
That is pretty impressive. I think the BOTE calculation for us is only a few hundred.
That’s impressive. My library (http://www.librarything.com/profile/OldThrasbarg) only has a little over 100 books. Did you have to shell out some dough to enter in more than 200?
Dennis: Yes, it’s $10/year or $25/life.
How long did it take to enter the books with a bar code reader? And can you recommend a bar code reader? It sounds like a great present for my wife who would definately like library thing
yeah, i want to know about the scanner, too: make, model, cost, source
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. — Erasmus
Scanner: http://stores.ebay.com/The-CueCat-Store
It doesn’t handle really small bar codes well, but there are few enough of those. Otherwise it works great, and you really can’t beat the price.
I scanned the bar codes into a text file and then imported the file into LibraryThing, working a shelf at a time by the end–sometimes I mistyped the ISBN of an older book without a bar code, or absentmindedly scanned the wrong one [*], and trying to sort out which was the problem was a lot more difficult when working by the bookcase.
My estimate is that I entered 200 books/hour.
[*] ISBN bar codes start with 978. They are on the back of trade paperbacks and hardcovers, but on the inside flap of mass market paperbacks (a UPC is on the back). Occasionally a book would look like a trade paperback but be distributed through the mass market.
There are a couple programs (Delicious Library for Mac is one) that just let you use any camera you have hooked up – built in isight for the Macbook would work, so you don’t need a specific scanner for some.
I used ReaderWare and a CueCat to scan my library, and was able to bulk-upload everything with an ISBN up to LibraryThing. Note that there are occasional collisions between ISBNs, so you have to always doublecheck the result of the scan.
That explains why you two just popped up in my “Users with your books” list.
Years ago, one of my kids stepped on my CueCat, so I never got a chance to use it to input into Library Thing. We had to do it all by hand. (“But you try to tell young people today that, and they won’t believe you…”)