Taming the Book Beast

[richlevy]

I have been considering using a scanner, specifically a Cuecat scanner I picked up for free a few years ago to catalog my library. I could never find any freeware or inexpensive software that would look up ISBN numbers.

While adding programs to my Linux laptop, I did a search for cuecat and found Alexandria book manager which will work with Cuecats.

Unfortunately, I could not find a Linux program to decrypt the scrambled output from the scanner. However, 10 minutes research with Google and a few minutes with an x-acto knife and magnifying glass and my Cuecat is now a standard scanner.

I'm still getting the hang of handling the scanner, but I have scanned 20 books into Alexandria in about 10 minutes. It's taking 4 or 5 passes to get the scanner to read the ISBN barcode.

It's still a lot of fun. It really doesn't take much to make me happy.

At the time I picked up 2 or 3 CueCats when they were being handed out. I think I gave the other two away, but it might be time to start looking for them.

The beauty of this is that since the software is on my laptop, I can take the laptop to the various book hoards around the house and start cataloging.