Scan Your Books And Search Them On Google

[vaksel]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/07/scan-your-books-and-search-them-on-google/

[dchest]

The title is kind of misleading. It's not about scanning books, only scanning barcodes.

[jganetsk]

Google really needs to market its lesser-known products better.

[pmjordan → jganetsk]

Absolutely. If I've understood the article correctly, I can refer to my books even when I'm out of the office? This is brilliant, I wish I'd known about it sooner.

One thing I don't quite follow: it's easy to find out the ISBN number of a book you don't own on amazon or so, which would allow you to add arbitrary books. I don't see how they get away with that.

[troystribling → pmjordan]

The access they provide is nothing beyond what you would get doing a normal Google book search. It just allows you to search over aggregations of books which you may or may not own.

[quizbiz]

I would love to be able to prove ownership and get full access to the book/override the limited preview.

I put in the ICBM of Founders at Work, but Google only permits its limited preview. My plan was to take the book to my college dorm when I move in late this summer, but I guess I will do without Chapter 19 and Chapter 28.

[tlrobinson]

Remember CueCat? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

If you still have one of those, you can hack it to output unobfuscated barcodes, which will work with this: http://cexx.org/cuecat.htm

[dazzawazza]

Cool, that nearly the same as my app http://www.beepmystuff.com except I use amazon and a USB web camera.

[theschwa]

So... Anyone want to make the Android app for this?

[yters]

So, uh, how do we scan our books then? I've got way too many dead trees in my house.