Reading an article on various home library cataloging apps, and the article's author repeatedly describes batch scanning lots of books at one time into these apps, without once explaining what "batch scanning" is, or how one goes about doing it.
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Reading an article on various home library cataloging apps, and the article's author repeatedly describes batch scanning lots of books at one time into these apps, without once explaining what "batch scanning" is, or how one goes about doing it. I tried to look up this process and got nowhere. Is this a physical barcode scanning tool, is the scanning itself some kind of an app, does this mean a list uploaded, copied and pasted from a document, or something else? (I have a lot of books from the pre-barcode era.)
Just about ready to do this by hand, if I have to. I don't want pie charts of nuanced narrative elements which are time-consuming and unhelpful to me, or the ability to give weirdly precise 3.72 star ratings. I just want a cataloging app that doesn't crash every five seconds when you try to add books to a virtual shelf or a tagged list.
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EllenInEdmonton :mstdnca:replied to Kim Possible last edited by
@kimlockhartga @bookstodon
Oh, the author is very correct!! Every book has an ISBN barcode on the back cover. If you open GR on your phone, you can "search"; in the search window, it offers the choice to scan the ISBN. If you click, the camera opens and you can whiz through a big stack of books, scanning them all like a grocery store clerk with your apples and bananas. Just glance to see that the book was correctly entered. After that, you can return the books to shelves and they're entered. -
Ronsboy67replied to EllenInEdmonton :mstdnca: last edited by
@EllenInEdmonton @kimlockhartga @bookstodon Just a heads up that not *every* book does have an ISBN, anywhere. I'm not sure when the ISBN system started, but books from before 1950 more often than not don't (especially if not printed in the UK or US) , and adoption of the system seems to have become truly universal only in the last couple of decades. I know this from having tried to find ISBNs in several older pbooks
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@ronsboy67 @EllenInEdmonton @kimlockhartga @bookstodon adding: sometimes ISBNs are reused by the publishers for different books (not very common,but it happens), so when scanning see if it's the book you have.
I'm using librarything that has a scan the barcode option. -
Sometimes the same ISBN on two different insides, and very often different ISBNs for the same inside with different bindings, which may or may not matter to you or to your lookup database.
Bulk scanning is wonderful when it works but the farther you are from sales norms the less of your collection will be covered.
@paulasimoes @ronsboy67 @EllenInEdmonton @kimlockhartga @bookstodon
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@clew @paulasimoes @ronsboy67 @EllenInEdmonton @bookstodon I learned this when I tried to get Goodreads to recognize my (very few) collectible editions.
Related: how does one know how much their book collection is worth? I guess the worth is based on condition, edition, binding, and what others would be willing to pay for them. I don't think I have anything that's particularly rare.
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@kimlockhartga @clew @paulasimoes @ronsboy67 @EllenInEdmonton @bookstodon establishing the value of used books these days is more art than science. (I’m selling a bunch of used semi-collectible books on eBay)
Some that I have sold for a lot were shown as having very little value by some apps - in part because those apps used ebook prices but also because they don’t handle truly collectible works well
(These aren’t old books - mass market paperbacks from the past 20 years but sell for $30-150+)
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@kimlockhartga @clew @paulasimoes @ronsboy67 @EllenInEdmonton @bookstodon online sources for book prices/values are also skewed by both ambitiously priced books listed on Amazon or abebooks / alibris (people often list books at crazy prices) or because a specific book has some unique features (like a work by a deceased author or one who rarely signs works - George R Martin rarely signs books so his works signed are pricy etc). And even sold listings on eBay can have high variance
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@Rycaut @bookstodon for me, what I am willing to pay for used books depends a lot on how hard they are to find, and what kind of shape they are in. I am perfectly fine with library bindings, though I know that would not be acceptable to others. The hardest ones for me to find have been Theo Ellsworth's old stuff, and some of Stephen Graham Jones' earliest work.
I find https://www.bookfinder.com to be helpful at times, but Abe Books is just as handy. I hope you are able to unload your books into the hands of those who will truly appreciate and enjoy them.
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@kimlockhartga @bookstodon thanks I'm similar, the price I'll pay varies but used book prices have definitely shifted in recent years - most have fallen to very low prices indeed ($1 or often much much less) but scarcer books even relatively modern printings have gotten a bit higher value and more in demand (though for collectibles the condition really matters)
The stuff I'm selling on eBay are from a collection I acquired for a few books I wanted, the rest have so far covered 3-4x my costs
