For those of you that know us, you know that everyone in my family is an inveterate reader.  One of the more unfortunate consequences of this is that we have a TON of books.  The front office in our house, the bonus room over the garage, and Daniel's old bedroom are all given over to books, my guess is that we have two or three thousand of them.

For Fathers day this year, Valorie got me a Flic Barcode scanner and some software from Collectorz.  The Flic barcode scanner is a small handheld scanner with memory for about 500 UPC codes, combined with Collectorz movie, book and music collector, it has the ability to categorize all our collections.

Initially I sort-of ignored it, but last night at about 10:00, Valorie reminded me of it.  I installed the software and played around with it a bit.  And a bit more.  And still some more.

Darn, I had never thought that I'd spend two and a half hours (with Valorie) running around pulling books from the library trying to find ones that the program wouldn't find.  And I've got to say, it did a remarkable job.  Except for the hundred or so books that pre-date bar-codes (I still have the very first book I ever purchased (Checkpoint Lambda by Murray Leinster), it did a remarkable job. 

Essentially the software reads the data off the barcode, then datamines off of a bunch of sites to build the database, including Amazon.com, B&N.com, Powells.com, the Library of Congress, imdb (for movies), etc.  It's actually pretty cool.

Again, this is just first impressions - one tricky bit is that the barcode on the back of the book often isn't the ISBN, which screws up the database lookup, but that's really not the fault of the software.

Anyway, it's a cool toy :)