>> CUTTS: Hey, everybody. We wanted to show you kind of a fun trick that you can do with
Google Book Search and a barcode scanner. Now, in theory, you could use the camera that's
built in to your Android G1 if you wanted to because there is a really nice barcode
functionality built in, there's a library you can use. So, someone could write a 20%
project to do this, but, today, what we're going to use is an actual barcode scanner.
Now, these are not that expensive. I got this for a little under seventy bucks from Amazon.
This from a company called Adesso, and it's called the NuScan 1000U. So, it's actually
really easy to use. It's just USB device, and you plug it in, and you can hear it's
ready to go, and it just pretends like it's a keyboard. So, all you have to do is put
it on a book, click the button and it will scan it. So, I brought some books in, "Google
Apps Deciphered," "Google Apps: The Missing Manual," and "Google Apps: The Administrator
Guide," and, of course, "Google Apps Hacks" from Philip Lenssen, a Google Blogoscope.
So, we've got a lot of Google Apps related book that we want to add to our library. So,
there's a little feature that you might not know in books.google.com. You go and you sign
in and you--see at the top right, there's a link that says "my library," and when you
click on it, it starts out as empty you don't have any books in your library at all. So,
let's add a few books using the barcode scanner. There will be a link for imported books, just
click that. And you'll see a text area where you can type in ISBN numbers. It's a real
pain to see an ISBN number--this number under the barcode--and actually type it in, so what
we're going to do is take our barcode scanner, put it right up to it and scan. And you can
hear the click and we got an ISBN number. So, now if you click the import button, we'll
see whether it found it correctly. And it did. It turns out that Google Apps Hacks might
have been called "Google Office Hacks" in an earlier life. So, now, if you want to import
more than one book at once, it's even easier. You just click import book. You still have
the text area. This barcode scanner looks just like you're typing on the keyboard. So,
I just scan something and I hit return. Now, I'm going to scan another book. There you
go. And let's do this final book. There you go. So, I've entered three books. I click
import and, sure enough, it found all of those three books. So now we have four books in
our library. And if you click "view my library," you can star them, you can look at them, and,
in fact, if you click on cover view--if we have covers for them--will show those covers.
There's a little known fact that you can search within books.google.com and only search over
your library, so, that's why you might use this. Imagine, for example, that you remembered,
"Oh, one of my code books, one of my programming books had something about quicksort, but I
don't remember which book it was." Well, you can go here and you could say "search over
my library" and then you'll be able to find whatever snippet was that was just in your
books that were on your bookshelf. So, it's a lot of fun and, more importantly, it's a
good reason to play with a gadget. So, you might want to try it. It's very cheap, very
easy to do and it's kind of fun to digitize your library, your bookshelf of books. And
it's not really scanning all these books in real time--you don't want to do that yourself--but
just by entering that ISBN number, you're able to search over your own books and search
over your library. Give it a try.
