Virtual Bookshelf Project

Today's experiment. Over the years, books have taken over my home. There are shelves in the study, every bedroom, the garage, the living room, even the bathroom. If I had an attic, I'm sure books would be up there too.

For about a year I thought about replacing all the shelves with a virtual library. One I could tour on my computer or tablet, browse covers, read descriptions; the virtual shelves could be magically arranged in different configurations, by genre, subject, or just in little nooks and crannies. They could pop out on carousels, expand in size as I passed nearer, etc.

Meanwhile, the "real" books would all be in boxes in the garage. But I wouldn't have to remember where any individual book was, or rummage through the boxes to find them, because each book in my virtual library would be tagged with the box location. I'd keep a simple shelf of books I'm currently using in the study and I'd regain about a gazillion square feet in the rest of the house and improve the overall Feng Shui.

So today I began. I loaded an app on my android phone called Book Catalogue. It's public domain and was created by Evan Leybourn. Then I loaded the free zxing bar code scanner software. Since I have a piddly 2G signal at home, I also swapped out my ancient router for one with more robust support for wifi, configured the phone to use it, and headed to the garage.

I labeled a clear storage box with a snap on lid to keep the dust out as "B1" with a sharpie and started scanning books' ISBNs with the camera on my phone. It went surprisingly well. Some I had to enter the ISBN directly, a few I had to actually do a search on, but in about an hour I had 52 books scanned. All that would fit in the box. Book Catalogue pulled down the book cover, description, author, genre and a bunch of other stuff automatically for each book.

The phone app has a pretty nice interface, but I knew I'd want to customize it, so to continue exploring the proof of concept I tested the various ways data could be exported and synced. It could export to the SD card as a csv file. Pretty handy. But it also synced to goodreads.com. I setup an account there, synced it from the android and created a shelf called B1 that I could browse from the web.

I think this might just work. Goodreads is useful, and there's also a place called Library Thing that does something similar. Neither is as fancy as what I envision doing with it someday, but they are a good halfway point, allowing me to continue with the project, clear out all the books, knowing that I can probably actually find them even easier than when they were all on the shelves.Now to buy some more boxes :)