Using a barcode scanner with Google Book Search

Key Takeaways

hey everybody we wanted to show you kind of a fun trick that you can do with Google book search and a barcode scanner now in theory you could use the camera that's built into your Android G1 if you wanted to because there's a really nice barcode functionality built in there's a library you can use so someone could write a 20% project to do this but today what we're going to use is an actual Barcode Scanner now these are not that expensive I got this for a a little under 70 bucks from Amazon this is uh from a company called a deso and it's called the new scan 1000 U so it's actually really easy to use it's just a USB device and you plug it in and you can hear it's ready to go and it just pretends like it's a keyboard so all you have to do is put it on a book click the button and it will scan it so I brought some books in Google apps deciphered um Google Apps the missing manual and Google Apps the administrator guide and of course Google Apps hacks from Philip linsen at Google blogos scoped so we've got a lot of Google apps related books that we want to add to our library so there's a little feature that you might not know in books.google.com you go and you sign in and you see up at the top right there's a link that says my library and when you click on it it starts out as empty you don't have any books in your library at all so let's add a few books using the barcode scanner there will be a link for import books just click that and you'll see a text area where you can type in ISBN numbers it's a real pain to see an ISBN number this number under the barcode and actually type it in so what we're going to do is take our Barcode Scanner put it right up to it and scan and you can hear the click and we got an ISBN number so now if you click the import button we'll see whether it found it correctly and it did it turns out that Google Apps hacked might have been called Google office hacks in an earlier life so now if you want to import more than one book at once it's even easier you just click import books you still have the text area this barcode scanner looks just like you're typing on the keyboard so I just scann something and it hit return now I'm going to scan another book there you go and let's do this final book and there you go so I've entered three books I click import and sure enough found all of those three books so now we have four books in our library and if you click view my library you can star them you can look at them and in fact if you click on cover viiew if we have covers for them we'll show those covers there's a little known fact that you can search within books.google.com and only search over your library so that's why you might use this imagine for example that you remembered oh one of my code books one of my programming books had something about quicksort but I don't remember which book it was well you can go here and you can say search over my library and then you'll be able to find whatever that snippet was that was just in your books that were on your bookshelf so it's a lot of fun and more importantly it's a good reason to play with a gadget so you might want to try it very cheap very easy to do and it's kind of fun to digitize your library your bookshelf of books and it's not really scanning all these books in real time you don't want to do that yourself but just by entering that ISBN number you're able to search over your own books and search over your life Library give it a try