many years ago, back when I was sawed-off software (arguably a much cooler name than prgmr.com) while the software for all this was still being built, my goal was to create software for these people. I failed, but it was an amusing story.
I though "well, first I need to sell some books, so I know what it's actually like" I'd hit craigslist for anyone wanting to move more than 500 books for under $0.10 per. At my peak I think I was approaching 10,000 books. Yes, I learned what it was like to be a book seller, but I got so distracted by actually selling that my software never amounted to anything salable. I eventually gave up when the competition's software reached a certain level of quality.
It was fun, though. did you know the barcodes on mass market paperbacks don't have ISBNs? trade paperbacks and hardcover paperbacks usually have ISBNs right on the barcodes, but not mass market paperbacks.
Mass market paperbacks have a publisher specific prefix, then the last four digits of the ISBN... so what I did was I created a lookup table that went from the publisher prefix to the ISBN prefix. whenever the software hit a unknown publisher prefix, it would ask the users to input the full ISBN by hand, from which it could fill in the database for that publisher prefix.
It was a lot of fun, but aside from getting distracted by actually selling books, I was focusing on the inventory control aspects of it... I was not picky about the sort of books I bought, so the vast majority would sit in inventory forever, and bring a dollar after shipping if they ever did sell. I talked about some kind of PDA scanner you could take to booksales, but I was obsessed with figuring out how to automatically identify the pre-barcode books (which seemed to be where the real money was) rather than going for the low-hanging fruit, the barcode books that were worth a few bucks.
my vast collection was donated to my brothers, who I think ran the bookselling software for a month before deciding it wasn't worth it. It ended up getting donated to the local "friends of the library" booksellers. (of course, the books had all been online for a year; anything that had a barcode and anything like a market value had gotten sold; I pity any other seller who wanted to pick through the mess.)
I did have some really neat pre-ISBN books. I had several translations of "the little red book" and a book by jack chick where he rants against something or other, I forget exactly. I think I still have a beautiful picture book about the American fission bomb tests over the pacific islands.
I not only enjoyed your post, but laughed when you said you were obsessed with pre-isbn scanning. I can instantly guarantee that would be a mistake I would make as well.
the thing of it is that it'd be a whole lot easier now, with modern smartphones having a decent amount of cpu and good cameras.
It'd still be really difficult to do the true "pre ISBN" books just 'cause those are difficult to identify even with human help. often the printing/publisher/ etc... info isn't on the amazon page, and that sort of thing is huge when it comes to values.
But for the post ISBN (or the SBN? what was that called? the american book number, before it was International?) things would be much easier; yeah, you've gotta ocr a string, but with today's smartphones, that'd be pretty easy. then you just come up with a list of editions or what have you. You'd still have the problem of amazon's info about old books being not great, but you'd at least duck the problem of getting a different book with the same title (which is more common than you think.)
Really, if I were to enter that market now, I'd definitely focus on the pre-barcode books, just 'cause as far as I can tell, the software for dealing with barcodes is pretty good, and I think modern smartphones are now powerful enough to do the OCR and other stuff required to deal with that sort of thing.
I though "well, first I need to sell some books, so I know what it's actually like" I'd hit craigslist for anyone wanting to move more than 500 books for under $0.10 per. At my peak I think I was approaching 10,000 books. Yes, I learned what it was like to be a book seller, but I got so distracted by actually selling that my software never amounted to anything salable. I eventually gave up when the competition's software reached a certain level of quality.
It was fun, though. did you know the barcodes on mass market paperbacks don't have ISBNs? trade paperbacks and hardcover paperbacks usually have ISBNs right on the barcodes, but not mass market paperbacks.
Mass market paperbacks have a publisher specific prefix, then the last four digits of the ISBN... so what I did was I created a lookup table that went from the publisher prefix to the ISBN prefix. whenever the software hit a unknown publisher prefix, it would ask the users to input the full ISBN by hand, from which it could fill in the database for that publisher prefix.
It was a lot of fun, but aside from getting distracted by actually selling books, I was focusing on the inventory control aspects of it... I was not picky about the sort of books I bought, so the vast majority would sit in inventory forever, and bring a dollar after shipping if they ever did sell. I talked about some kind of PDA scanner you could take to booksales, but I was obsessed with figuring out how to automatically identify the pre-barcode books (which seemed to be where the real money was) rather than going for the low-hanging fruit, the barcode books that were worth a few bucks.
my vast collection was donated to my brothers, who I think ran the bookselling software for a month before deciding it wasn't worth it. It ended up getting donated to the local "friends of the library" booksellers. (of course, the books had all been online for a year; anything that had a barcode and anything like a market value had gotten sold; I pity any other seller who wanted to pick through the mess.)
I did have some really neat pre-ISBN books. I had several translations of "the little red book" and a book by jack chick where he rants against something or other, I forget exactly. I think I still have a beautiful picture book about the American fission bomb tests over the pacific islands.