The few ISBN’s that I tested were also good. I quickly looked over the spreadsheet he’d sent (2000+ books!) and spot-checks seemed to indicate that the author/titles were reasonably accurate. And about 5 days later my oursourced librarian/servant sends me an email saying he’s finished. We agreed that a week was a reasonable timeframe and off he went. At that price I figured it was a pretty safe bet, particularly since he’d already gone and transcribed the first photo from the set and the accuracy was great. I ended up choosing someone who had never done work on Elance and was willing to do the work for a very good price ($50) in order to build up his online reputation on the service. Like, wayyy down, until we were much more in the range I felt comfortable with. But the nice thing about Elance is that you can choose to make all bids visible to other bidders so competitive pressure quickly brought the price down. The first few were a little frightening – several people set their price in the $500 range… and believe me, having a list of the books that I own isn’t worth that much to me. So I did that, posted it, and then the bids started rolling in. Let me know if there are any other questions.Įlance is pretty straightforward – the interface is a little bit convoluted (actually it’s pretty poorly designed, IMHO) but once you get the basic idea it’s easy enough to set up the parameters of your project. The photos that you will be working from are located here: If you look through these you’ll see that towards the end there are several photos that overlap with each other, due to the difficulty in photographing certain shelves. Presumably not all of the books will have an ISBN associated with them but do your best :-). The spreadsheet should have book title, author and then you’ll need to use this information to look up the ISBN for the book and include that. I used Elance and the bid looked like this:Ĭonvert photos of bookshelf into list of books I’ve taken high resolution photos of all the books on my bookshelves (so you can see their spines) and want to have someone transcribe this information into a spreadsheet (Excel or Google Spreadsheet). But the next step was to get an actual text listing of all these books – so it was time to see if I could get someone to do that work for me. Just having the photos alone is kind of cool, actually. These are mostly the books from my main ‘SF paperback shelf’ – which is a pretty decent sampling of what I was reading while growing up, along with some newer works. It took a total of about 50 photos to cover all the bookshelves – a subset of these can be found here, just to give you an idea of what the photos were like. (There also ended up being some shuffling of lights around in order to find a configuration that didn’t put text-obscuring glare on the books as well – I sure could have used a softbox, but don’t have one handy at the time.) But overall it wasn’t too painful and as soon as I had a decent picture of most everything I tossed it all up on Flickr. It took a little more time than I’d planned – I wanted to make sure the images were readable so I shot on a tripod to get nice sharp images and that meant each image took a bit of setup. The first thing I did was take good photos of all the bookshelves. So, mostly out of curiosity, I thought I’d see how well that sort of thing works. Getting someone else to do the work, however, isn’t a bad idea… and anybody who is plugged into productivity blogs like Lifehacker or 43Folders can’t help but be aware of how easy it is these days to get some cheap outsourced labor for doing exactly this sort of thing. (Okay, I’m not really sure why it would be handy… it just seems like it would, okay?)īut even I am not quite obsessive enough to sit down and actually type in such a list… there’s just better things I could spend my time on. You are what you read, right? There’s a little part of each one of these books up in my brain somewhere…Īt any rate, I’ve always thought it would be handy to have a list of them. But I also can’t look at them without contemplating how everything one has read contributes to who they have become. And I do love to be able to pull a previously-read book off of the shelf and dive back into it, even if only for a few minutes. For some reason I’ve pretty much always held onto the books I’ve read – something I started when young and at this point it seems like it would be a shame to stop now. The 2nd bedroom/office has a good chunk of 3 walls covered and there are bunches more out in the living room. Anybody that’s ever visited my house knows that I’ve got a lot of books laying around. Just finished with a fun little experiment, thought I’d share it.
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