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May 20, 2012 10:42 AM

I have a large number of books that I want to donate to a library or sell. I want to give my friends and family first pick at anything they want (my primary aim is to quickly reclaim the physical space used up by the books). I need a workflow that will allow me to scan the books' UPCs, etc. with my iPhone 4's camera and end up with an email-able spreadsheet pre-populated with ISBN/Title/Author. Columns for genre, edition and/or year, and short blurbs would also be welcome. I have a PC laptop with the MS Office suite in addition to the iPhone. What are my options? Thanks, hivemind!
posted by Inspector.Gadget to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I suspect you could do this by opening a LibraryThing account, using the RedLaser App to add your books, and then exporting your data as a CSV file (you have to be logged in to see the link) or whatever, which Excel will happily open. Voila!
posted by pullayup at 11:27 AM on May 20, 2012 [2 favorites]

The iphone app My Library scans barcodes, creates a database and gives you the option to export as .csv file.
posted by KateViolet at 11:27 AM on May 20, 2012

If you are going to foillow pullayup's suggestion, you need to use the "RL Classic" app and not the new version called "RedLaser".

The old one will export the raw barcode also but the new one does not.
posted by hariya at 11:32 AM on May 20, 2012

I did this very thing and sold ~300 books to a local dealer in Colorado Springs about a year ago. The .csv file MyLibrary created required a bit of cleanup and tinkering, but it still expedited the process immeasurably.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 11:34 AM on May 20, 2012

You could also open a Goodreads account, use the Goodreads app to scan in the UPCs, and then export the list from Goodreads as a CSV. (I found I still had to add some of my books manually, especially if they were foreign or old.)
posted by mskyle at 6:13 AM on May 21, 2012

Yep, LibraryThing. One of the "catalog" layouts also will display pending requests for a given book on various sites.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:52 AM on May 21, 2012