All? You must have a young library. I would be unable to scan at least half of mine, as they were printed before UPC codes existed.
LOL - I have MAYBE 200 books and my wife thinks I’m a hoarder 
No, not all. I had to manually look up a lot of books, and manually enter a few as well.
My bathroom and kitchen each have fewer than 200 books in them. All other rooms in the house have many, many more than 200.
We’re moving in about a month and a half. I dread it.
good time to catalog. organize your shelf order. put up more shelves than you have now and leave shelf space for new acquisitions.
The program does make a cute blipping noise when an ISBN is scanned in to its Auto Catalog list. Although it also makes an unmusical beep when the ISBN doesn’t check.
As long as they don’t drop the Palm version, I’m happy. It **will **export to CSV, HTML, iPOD Notes, and a couple of other formats, if that’s any help.
I’ve just added the first 216 books in my collection, and I’m not even through the As yet (although that number does include the anthologies).
They’re all shelved, though. Finally.
Ha. Ahahaha. Ha.
Right now, I have a huge wall of built in bookshelves, which my grandfather purposely designed and built because he was a reader, and I have various other bookcases scattered around the house. I also have a LARGE storage shed that’s crammed full of boxes of books, and I rotate the boxes in and out of the house. I’m gonna have to hit Target or someplace and buy lots and lots of bookshelves for the new house, but I’m still probably going to have to rotate the boxes of extras in and out of the house. I’ve been packing up, mostly books that I know I won’t NEED to read before we move.
And for at least half of my collection, quite probably more, a CueCat would be of no use. I have a lot of old books, which were printed before the advent of ISBNs and their bar codes.
Maybe I’ll get around to cataloging books some day, but right now is not gonna be that time. I’ll do it when I have my husband and/or daughter around and when they’re willing to do a lot of the physical moving. Right now I’m packing slowly because I’ve already tried to take it too fast, and I strained something.
Wow but this Cuecat scanner can be fussy sometimes (mostly with my hardcover books from Baen). So, I am looking, ideally, for some cataloging software that doesn’t limit itself to one category of items (ie; Books, Comics, movies, video games) and which doesn’t cost me my firstborn child. I suppose if I buy one program each paycheck, it’s not such a hit, but geez, this will add up otherwise.
DVD Profiler, if I decide to own more than 50 DVDs (do I already? I dunno!), will cost me $30. Not too bad, except it doesn’t catalog anything except DVDs. OK, exactly what it says on the tin, not like they tried to convince me otherwise.
Collectorz, for the home-version, is $30 for the version with the features I’ll ever actually use, and $50 for the super-duper version. Or $20 a year for the online version. The catch is, this is for each category. Want to catalog my games? $30. Want to catalog my books? $30. Movies? $30.
Readerware costs $40 (!) for each category it does (Books, Movies, and Music), vs LibraryThing which is free. The question becomes, do I want to pay $40 for that satisfying beep sound Readerware makes? Soo tempting.
I’d forgotten about the CueCat; I remember I really really wanted one when they came out, but they were hard to get here.
My Android phone has some scanners that are useful (scan an item in a store and it shows prices online and in your area, scan a DVD cover and it tells you about the movie), but looking just now I couldn’t find a book scanner, which would be super-cool.
Any suggestions?
Regarding the CueCat - when Googling on it I found information on how to get around the proprietary coding of info that it does, which seemed to turn it into a more general scanner. I don’t know whether this would help the OP or not, however.
CueCat? Weren’t those given out free at Radio Shacks in the US? I vaguely recall their being associated with newspaper articles and ads – I think you could scan the bar code and it would take you to a web site. I had no idea they were still around. Sounds cool, though.
that is the item, company and function long gone.
it was a CueCat specific type barcode.
I have one I got free from subscribing to Wired, but all my sf books are index already, and most of the magazines are way before barcodes (2200, up to 1955 F&SFs.) My plan is to write a script to convert the spreadsheet into a number of html tables so I can look up what I have on my Droid when book shopping.
The CueCats used to be proprietary (and designed for PS/2 keyboard plugs), but I think most of the ones you see nowadays are “Declawed” and converted to USB. Seems there is one connection on the circuitboard that you can break and it makes it into a normal (cheap) barcode scanner. Looks like various companies bought them, declawed them, and now either sell them on their own, or in packages with their own barcode scanning software.
You forgot the hacking and the lawsuit threats and the drama. That was most of the fun when this technology was new and Digital Convergence, the company that created the Cat, still existed. This may go some way towards explaining why Digital Convergence doesn’t exist anymore.
This history is interesting mainly as an example of a common story that still comes around every so often: A new technology is introduced, the people find an unintended use for it, the company that thinks it ‘owns’ the technology goes apeshit, and everyone gets to jump in on the drama for a while to pound the company’s notions of ownership into the ground. (See also: every single DRM scheme, ever.)
I would have loved to have one when cataloging our DVD/BluRay collection in Collectorz. I think we could start a Blockbuster and manually entered them all because scanners were very expensive when we started.