Books

19 Jul 2012

Update: It’s buggy on Snow Leopard, which is probably why they are making codex. I guess there is motivation to roll my own. After I learned java as an undergraduate, I wanted to make an application that read in ISBN numbers through a webcam (before the days where cameras were everywhere) to catalog all my books. Every time I think of a good idea, I ask one of my friends and they show me a website where that has been done before. I got introduced to Delicious Library. I didn’t have a mac at the time, so it would be nice to make a cross platform java version of it. I got as far as looking up how the barcodes get translated into numbers and writing a few lines of MATLAB to read in barcodes from images, but I was stumped by the low resolution and lack of compatibility of the webcams with Java. I couldn’t access the full resolution of the webcam I had or it wasn’t compatible. So I promptly abandoned the project and managed to have a few duplicate books in my library as time went on. Fast forward to today, where cameras are everywhere. I expected there to be a cloud website where I could use my mobile device and keep track of my books. QR codes are hot. I was curious to see why they didn’t put Delicious Library into the cloud, but there seems to be an issue with using Amazon’s API for looking up ISBNs and Amazon’s terms of service for mobile. The quality of other APIs are lacking. Now that I use a mac, I’m reluctant to pay money for something I could probably code up myself easily since I’m only looking for basic functionality. Thankfully I found Books from Audacious Software. They even opened up the source code since they are working on a successor called Codex. It even allows exporting the data, so if I ever need to migrate the data, I can.