How to use ISBN scanner for creating e-library?

Let's say you decided to create an electronic book catalog from your home library of paper books (or school library, or corporate library). The advantages of electronic library are obvious - quick search, organizing book metadata, creating lists by genre, author, series, etc., keeping track of books borrowed to friends / students / employees. But what is the easiest and fastest way to solve the digitization problem?

There are three ways:

The first is to take each book, scan the cover, manually fill out the book card in the cataloging program: enter the title, authors, series, year, publisher, number of pages, etc. It will take a very long time.

The second is to enter the title of each book and update its data from the Internet. Many programs for the electronic library (Calibre, Alfa, etc.) are integrated with book sites like Amazon and can find the desired book on them, download its cover and retrieve full metadata. This method will save you a lot of time.

The third is even more convenient. You enter only the list of ISBN-numbers into the program and it automatically finds books and updates the covers and metadata. ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Unlike the title of the book, it does accurately identify the book. An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition and variation (except reprintings) of a publication. For example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book will each have a different ISBN.

How to find the ISBN on a book? This is a barcode picture with numbers that is usually located on the book cover. It can contain a number of 10 or 13 digits (10 is the old standard, 13 is the new).

However, entering numbers manually is certainly faster than entering titles, but it's also not very convenient. To speed up the process, people came up with barcode scanners.



You can buy such a scanner for about $30. Choose a wireless scanner so you can quickly scan a book and put it back on the shelf instead of lugging all the books to your computer. After scanning, you connect the scanner to your computer via USB and transfer the file with the list of ISBN codes. Then, import it to your software.



Alternatively, you can use your phone as a scanner. There are several mobile apps for iOS and Android that use a smartphone camera to scan barcodes. Some of them are even free, like Alfa ISBN Scanner. Thus, you do not spend money and do not wait for the scanner delivery. And, it's a smartphone, you can transfer the ISBN list to your computer in any convenient way - via USB, email, messenger or cloud storage.



Some book cataloging programs, like Delicious Library, allow even scan ISBNs using a computer's webcam. In this case, the book is added automatically (without the list importing). This is very convenient, but still need to bring each book to your computer and then take it back to the bookshelf.