3 ms·

I not only enjoyed your post, but laughed when you said you were obsessed with pre-isbn scanning. I can instantly guarantee that would be a mistake I would make

• lsc 16y ago
  the thing of it is that it'd be a whole lot easier now, with modern smartphones having a decent amount of cpu and good cameras. It'd still be really difficult to do the true "pre ISBN" books just 'cause those are difficult to identify even with human help. often the printing/publisher/ etc... info isn't on the amazon page, and that sort of thing is huge when it comes to values. But for the post ISBN (or the SBN? what was that called? the american book number, before it was International?) things would be much easier; yeah, you've gotta ocr a string, but with today's smartphones, that'd be pretty easy. then you just come up with a list of editions or what have you. You'd still have the problem of amazon's info about old books being not great, but you'd at least duck the problem of getting a different book with the same title (which is more common than you think.) Really, if I were to enter that market now, I'd definitely focus on the pre-barcode books, just 'cause as far as I can tell, the software for dealing with barcodes is pretty good, and I think modern smartphones are now powerful enough to do the OCR and other stuff required to deal with that sort of thing.