I’ve got a lot of books. I have no idea really how many.

For a long time I wish I actually had a master list of all the books I own. This goes beyond mere anal retentiveness: it dawns on me that I probably have thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of books. It would be great if I had a master list if only for insurance purposes.

I also spend the weekend cleaning out my garage. Between my nextdoor neighbor Sam and myself, we easily filled a 20 cubic yard dumpster with crap. As I did so, I realized I had many
books in banker’s boxes stored in my garage. If I actually had them coded (as well as potentially
having the boxes barcoded) I could easily find books that I kept in storage.

So, towards that end, here are some links….

Andy Plotkin has a nice page on his nearly identical project. There are websites that allow you to search for books by ISBN. Even
Amazon allows you to do that, using some fairly simple web services.
If you need to print barcodes, there is some
GNU software to help you out.

I’m also thinking about indexing my CD and DVD collections (not as vast, but probably worth
logging as well).