Barcode your bookshelf with Google Books features a short video that shows how to use a bar code scanner to enter your books into your personal library on Google Books. I don’t have a scanner, but I bet lots of you do! Handy, fast way to get lots of books entered quickly.
Why bother adding books to Google Books? As they note at the end of the video, once you’ve built a collection, you can easily search the full text of just your own book collection. Handy for those times that you can’t remember which of your books has the information you’re looking for.
I am simultaneously thrilled and horrified! Thank you for posting. I’m happy that I read about it here first.
My first reaction was, “Oh no! I need to completely change my workflow (in the private library where I’m “cataloging” thousands of books). The ability to search a particular string of text within this particular library would be useful and powerful.
But the cataloger in me was horrified when the demonstrator scanned the first book in his pile and said, ” It turns out that ‘Google Apps Hacks’ MIGHT HAVE BEEN CALLED ‘Google Office Hacks’ at one point…”
The combination of controlled vocabulary (or lack thereof) and all our information under one company’s “control” is going to keep me up at night 😉
Still. I’m tempted.
My inner cataloger flinched at that too! Wonder what percentage of the searches bring up inaccurate results?
Even if it might be a risk to put all our eggs in one basket, so to speak, I think it’s really a useful service. But then, I’m not dealing with real collections anymore. I’ll be curious to hear if and how you end up using google books with the collection you’re cataloging.
Don’t lose sleep! 🙂