I’ve always (second grade and on, long story) been a voracious reader. Since many of these books are like old friends, I almost only buy my books, which means that in my forties that I have quite a few.
Stop. Had a delay on this thought. Thought a bit. Changed the music in listening to. Sorry for the disjointed thought process. Reasons.
Right. So I’ve got books. I was going to get in the why, dance around the discussion, sweet-talk the why of this post. It doesn’t matter why. I’ve got books. A lot of them are trash. A lot of them are in series. So the issue comes in that o don’t know what books I have. I don’t know what books I don’t. I don’t know where any given book is. I don’t know which Verizon of which book I have. I don’t know what I need to build a set.
Secondary issues come down I don’t want to use someone else’s property system they can turn off for reasons. I don’t want my book ownership to be used to define me. I don’t want to be stuck with the tools someone else says. Not every book has an ISBN. Not every ISBN is unique.
So we have a few constraints.
- Enter all the books with limited work
- No Amazon or Google as a primary tool
- No current app I’ve found to organize
- Be able to find the books I need
So the best way would be an infinite memory and organizational skill. That’s not happening. Second best. With a minimum number of steps define the book, and it’s version. Now I can identify book and author by looking at spines, but how.
- Depth perception tells me distance which gives me size
- Geometry gives dimensions
- Spine gives me an author and or title
- Front cover fills in the gaps
Looking through a bakers dozen on one of my auxiliary shelves I saw quite a range. Authors not on every spine. Some titles smaller. The works. So how do I know which one is which?
I’m thinking a bit of machine learning will do the trick. A vocabulary of name or author would probably do the trick. King could be either for example, but Stephen is probably an author. Shining could be either, but The is an is name. This won’t be perfect, but I’m not perfect.