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Here's an idea I have for an online bookstore. I like old books. Right now my interest is on Watchmaking, Electronics, and Machining. The books I like are a
by hellbannedguy 5y ago
Here's an idea I have for an online bookstore.
I like old books.
Right now my interest is on Watchmaking, Electronics, and Machining.
The books I like are are usually old, and only found while browsing used bookstores in person. Books with no isbn's. Books that are rare. Books I didn't knew existed. Manuals I didn't know about.
My idea is having the owners of used book stores take pictures of the books they have on shelves(Just the spines. They would need to walk down the isles, and take clear pictures of each wall of books. They would send the pictures to me, and I would somehow stitch the pics into an app.
I have taken pictures of my books on my shelfs, and even with an old iphone, I can zoom into read titles on books.
The end result would be a website where the customer could digitally walk down book store isles (navigation like google maps?) , and order books they might fancy. Think of the way we look at digital paintings in museums?
The owner would get 95% of each sale, or more? Or, all of the money, if the entity was set up as a 501c3 to benefit used book stores.
Imagine all those old books out there, and walking down an isle on books in Ohio, or Ireland, and ordering a book you see on the shelf?
On a certain level, I hope an app like this is never built by anyone. The internet has ruined so many things I liked. Finding an obscure book, at a reasonable price, in a musty book store is an experience I enjoy.
(I'm suprised Google hasen't attempted it already. They could probally do it very well in a virtual reality setting? Oh yea, I like the app this guy did.)
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThat’s a great idea! My sister-in-law owns an independent bookstore. I suspect the idea could get some traction. However, you’d probably need more than spines. One of the things about being in a store, is the ability to pull the book out, and look into it; maybe even ask questions of the staff.
- EveYoung 5y agoI guess you could use OCR and object detection to identify books from their spines and link to Google Books or Goodreads.
- webmaven 5y ago> I guess you could use OCR and object detection to identify books from their spines and link to Google Books or Goodreads. Google has a patent on doing just that: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150371085A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150371085A1/en
- cocoafleck 5y agoMy gut tells me that that patent falls afoul of the "with a computer" problem (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/supreme-court-smashes-do-it-on-a-computer-patents-in-9-0-opinion/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/supreme-court-sm...). Replace computer with human and they sound ridiculous.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoMy idea is a bit different. We might be able to get our own patent? Maybe? If anyone wants to pay for the patent, I'd be willing to split any future revenue 50/50. Could you take the idea, and do it yourself--yes. I do need something in my life I put energy into though yes! You might be helping out a disenfranchised/poor developer? I reside in the Bay Area. My email is dandunphy@comcast.net (On another note, I have felt for awhile Patents, and Trademarks, should be tied to income, and number of patents applied for. A poor person, like myself, pays just as much as Google for a patent. Crazy? I would like to see patent fees on a graduated scale. Companies that spit out patents daily would be charged much more for every patent. For instance, Google's first patent would be $1000. After 10 the price is 1 million per patent. After 20 the price per patent is 100 million.)
- 101008 5y agoI like the idea, I love to wander on old bookstores as well. But that's the magic, isn't? Walk there, be there, listen the sounds, see tourists as well, see the owner (often an old person with his own "methods"), the smell, the closed spaces. I like the idea but the feeling won't be the same at all if I can navigate it from the couch.
- wdb 5y agoI was looking on this website to find some good books about Watchmaking! Got any suggestions?
- bwb 5y agoAdded to my list and I'll see what I can do about that :)
- wdb 5y agoAwesome :) Sometimes I just wish I could have my private library at home. Slide alongside the bookshelves etc
- hellbannedguy 5y agoBooks by De Carle, Fried, and George Daniels.
- personlurking 5y agoMy main pet peeve while browsing in person is the constant turning of my head (sideways) from left to right, because titles on book spines aren't always facing the same direction. Google could fix that.
- martyvis 5y agoAisles. (I'm sorry to be that guy). But, yep this is a great idea. And you could probably do it from a video walking down those aisles - and present it via a VR or AR technique.
- 1-6 5y agoThere are various examples of people creating storefronts in applications like Minecraft and Roblox. I think it's just a matter of time before we see a better 3D World constructed in webassembly to represent millions of stores across the world. That marketplace will be huuge!
- intrasight 5y agoIt'll be a thing - 4 years tops. Hopefully there will still be such cool independent bookstores by then.
- chrisjarvis 5y agoThat would be extremely cool for many niche interests and hobbies. I think it would be a lot of work for book store owners however because along with taking pictures they would also need to fill in some metadata as well about the book to make any kind of searching/categorizing possible. Maybe an intrepid entrepreneur could start with a few bookstores and do that categorization for them as a "do things that don't scale" experiment.