I have hundreds of books, stored in boxes and lying all about. It would take three lifetimes to read them all, if I was dedicated. Which I’m not.
So now it’s trench warfare in the War on Crap, Spring cleaning my book collection one title at a time. But the battle is going well, thanks to Delicious Library (not to be confused with del.icoi.us)
Here’s what makes the work so easy: I simply hold a book, CD or DVD up to my Mac’s iSight camera, Delicious Library reads the bar code and does all the data entry. If the book is one I want to keep I drag the image to a representation of the bookcase where I’m keeping it. If the book is one that I want to sell I can imediately see Amazon’s going price for used editions. If the book is selling for less than a dollar I drag the image to my “disposed” shelf and I bag the book for the local library’s used book bin. If the book sells for over a dollar I can list it on Amazon with one click.
This has hugely simplified the task of processing my old books while at the same time satisfying my obsessive-compulsive desire to eek out some value from all this paper. For Windows users check Lifehacker’s write up on Libra.