David mentioned his interesting LibraryThing setup to be just after Christmas and it had me intrigued. He said he had a barcode scanner hooked up. He’s using a CueCat, which as the MAKE magazine story below suggests, is now quite a popular choice among LT users due to a new import system.
For those unaware of it, the CueCat was a late-90s fad launched by a dotcom company hoping to persuade publishers to embed barcodes in magazines and newspapers in place of URLs. A CueCat user would then scan the barcode to visit a referenced website. Unfortunately for the company, the business model of giving the scanners away for free came to little, and a host of negative publicity was incited by the fact the CueCat sent individually-identifiable information along with each scan. But still, they’re eBay fodder and are by far the cheapest type of USB barcode reader to obtain. And easily hacked.
Until now I’ve always used Delicious Library in combination with my iSight to capture barcodes – which worked okay on my iMac with an external iSight and works pretty well on my MacBook.
The main benefit of using a CueCat is speed. The iSight is pretty good at recognising most barcodes, but you still have to do a fair amount of repositioning before it recognises some barcodes. It’s also difficult to get the contrast in the image high enough to tackle books with glossy covers and the like. Using LibraryThing you can scan barcodes straight in using the ‘laser’ inside the CueCat.
LibraryThing have bulk ordered CueCats, and are selling them for $15 with US shipping or $20 with international shipping. £10 seems reasonable for such a thing given that I might find other uses for it, so I’m going to give it a go.
John writes -“LibraryThing lets you catalog your books, but the coolest part, to me, is that they have a feature that lets you repurpose the CueCat, a late-ninties barcode scanner which was hitherto useless dot com schwag. Now you can use it to scan your books into their system! Very cool.” – Link.
Related:
PalmOne Zire + CueCat = Barcode scanner? – Link.
C.R.T. Cat – Link.
Dialing from a picture frame – Link.
LEGO barcode reader – Link.
(Via MAKE Magazine).
Ahhh, the CueCat. The pseudo-barcode scanner that refuses to die.
Software and commentary can be found on azalea.com/CueCat
Cheers Jerry!
As usual my knowledge about techy things is limited but LibraryThing has been doing the rounds of Bookcrossing. Quite a lot of Bookcrossers use it to catalogue their permanent collection i.e. books that will not be left in a bus shelter for a jakey to urinate on.
Yes, I was aware that there was some overlap between the BC and LT communities – my colleague Iain has a friend who is quite active in BC in Glasgow (you’ll probably know him – I’ll get the name), who also uses LT to catalogue. I can see why LT would be attractive to ‘social’ readers like yourselves.
Pingback: CueCat & LibraryThing - update at Earth: Mostly Harmless