Monday, June 1, 2009

Barcode-scanning Your Bookshelf for Google Books

Google’s Matt Cutts shows how he adds books to his Google Books “My library” feature... using a below-70 bucks barcode scanner which he USB-connected to his computer. Why would you want to do that? One reason is to make your book shelf searchable. If you don’t have a barcode scanner you could also search for the book title to add the book of course... I could imagine it’s not that much slower.

“My library” is a nice feature from Google Books (I copied it for one of my sites!). Perhaps for the future, Google should allow us to simply photograph our book shelf – for those who still have book shelves – and then apply some OCR magic or image comparison to save us even the job of barcode scanning.

In other Matt news, there’s an SEO related presentation he did and for which he put up the slides. There’s no video there yet but some of the slides are more or less self-explanatory. Slide 32 of 50, titled “Update often”, is a jab at Sergey Brin’s “blog” (called Too and opened in 2008, it consists of only two posts).

[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]

Barcode-scanning Your Boo ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+0)

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