A little technology post here.‚ I have a mac and last week I ran upon a program called Books.‚ It is an open-source book cataloging application for MacOS X.
What it does is allow you to use the ISBN number (or author or title, etc) of any book you own to create an entry into its system so that you can keep track of your cool book collection.‚ It even has a section to record to whom you might have loaned the book out.‚ But it gets better!
It actually has a button that if you click it, the program will engage your iSight camera (or any other default video camera attached to your computer) and produce a video capture screen that has a series of lines on it.‚ If you put the bar code of the book up to those series of lines, it will read the bar code, grab the ISBN, put it in the new book ISBN section so that you can click “Quick Fill”.‚ It will then go out to the internet database you have chosen (I use amazon’s US site) and download all the information about the book into your database.
Voila!‚ You have cataloged your entire collection in no time.
Yes, from zenwebmastertechguru Phillips. Great app!