Your physical library

[gtuckerkellogg 33]

Over in the "Go Paperless" forum there has been a lively discussion of using QR codes with Evernote. I'm now using the same tool to organize the books in our home.

QR code readers, in addition to handling the QR codes themselves, also let your phone or tablet operate as a barcode reader. For most books, this means you can scan the ISBN number from the back cover. The QR code reader I use (QR Droid) has a "book search" option so I can pull up the book entry from google books or Amazon. So I can create an Evernote note for each book simply by scanning the back cover and looking up the book.

The question then becomes how to organize them. I can create a notebook for our household library, and I can use note links to get a single note listing all the books on any given bookcase. I can even tag that note with a QR code of its own so I can get all the books for a bookcase in an instant.

This is useful, but unfortunately doesn't have a "reverse lookup" like a real database. That is, if I find a book, it doesn't tell me where I should find a book (or where I should put it), because the links are all going FROM the location TO the note for each book, not the other way around. I think in the next release of the Mac version there will be note links supported in AppleScript, so I can make these links in bulk, but until then I have a a little AppleScript that lets me append some text (the location) to all the notes in my selection. I suppose I could use tags but that seems like overkill.

Any thoughts on improving this would be welcome.

(UPDATED: I didn't realize the obvious solution in front of my nose. If I use note links to catalog a given bookcase, the link titles will contain all the titles, so it's trivial to recall where they should go. D'oh!)

[gazumped 11,652]

I cheated. I use a Droid book-collector app which handles barcode lookups and getting the details in a standard form*, and allows me to specify which user-defined "bookcase" I want to store that record in. The app has a CSV export option which I can use from time to time to store the results in Evernote. If only I could find one that does music and film files in a format I like...

*it also allows ISBN, title and manual entries - good, since some of my books seem to pre-date the Flood.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

all of my books are in alphabetical order by author (title if no author). i have over a thousand books ( i am a researcher), but can find anything in seconds. if all goes well, i will have them all digitized in a year or two

[gtuckerkellogg 33]

I cheated. I use a Droid book-collector app which handles barcode lookups and getting the details in a standard form*, and allows me to specify which user-defined "bookcase" I want to store that record in. The app has a CSV export option which I can use from time to time to store the results in Evernote.

Cool, I want it. What's that app?

[gazumped 11,652]

There are thousands of book catalogue / collector apps out there, so major caveat: this is my favourite, but there could be better ones - I just don't have time to keep looking! (Having said that, the one time I had a problem and winged, the developer emailed me back a solution within a few days..)

Android Market -

[suziepenguin 0]

I cheated. I use a Droid book-collector app which handles barcode lookups and getting the details in a standard form*, and allows me to specify which user-defined "bookcase" I want to store that record in. The app has a CSV export option which I can use from time to time to store the results in Evernote.

New to Evernote (and to having a smart phone), but very excited to learn everything I can, so a quick question please. I also use a book collector/cataloger android app (Book Catalogue it's fab!). It has a CSV export option too, but how would I get it into Evernote? BC only gives me the ability to send the file as an email attachment. So I downloaded it, opened it in Excel, and tried to copy/paste it into Evernote but wow Evernote did not like it at all. The formatting was all messed up. Maybe my question is more about how to get Evernote and Excel to play nice...I'm a huge book nerd, so the ability to have a well-organized listing of all my books that is accessible all the time and to have a back-up of said list is very important to me.

[gazumped 11,652]

Oops - sorry for a slow reply.. distracted by holidays and year ends. I wasn't exactly clear with my previous post - I CSV export from my book catalogue and just dump (cut and paste) the resulting text file into Evernote; it helps me check whether I have a book and if so where it is, but the display isn't for the faint-hearted. I can use the mobile version of the catalogue software for more detail once I know the book is in there. However it occurs to me that if I want to spend the time I can tidy that up in a spreadsheet (not indexable by Evernote) and print it from Excel to a PDF (which is) and dump that file into my database. I wouldn't try to paste a table with lots of columns directly into a note - that way lies madness. For interest I just talked my two sons (I think) into agreeing to a family-spread database of all the films we buy. We're sharing a notebook and dumping an IMDB clip of the basic details into a note so we all know what everyone's got. (We share the same dubious tastes). Seems to me that there are enough book sites that a catalogue could be made within Evernote with similar clips of book details.