Buy a cheap hand held battery operated wireless barcode scanner (cheap on AliExpress). These work really well for scanning stacks of books... pick the book up,

Buy a cheap hand held battery operated wireless barcode scanner (cheap on AliExpress). These work really well for scanning stacks of books... pick the book up, zap, put the book down. You have to config the scanner to operate in "keyboard" mode or some such... basically what you scan gets typed as if from a keyboard. I used a simple Excel macro for data capture and lookup. Basically when a cell changed (book was scanned) it would request the book data from outpan.com. If outpan didn't know the upc beep and return to the cell, otherwise decode the response (json) and populate the spreadsheet row. Here's the excel macro (why I used the B column instead of the A column is a longer story): Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range) If Target.Cells.Count <> 1 Then Exit Sub End If If Application.Intersect(Range("B2:B99999"), Range(Target.Address)) Is Nothing Then Exit Sub End If Dim Ean Ean = CStr(Target.value) Dim Url Url = "https://api.outpan.com/v2/products/" + Ean + "?apikey=[haha get your own key haha]" Dim HttpRequest Set HttpRequest = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP") HttpRequest.Open "GET", Url, False HttpRequest.Send Set json = New VbsJson Set o = json.Decode(HttpRequest.ResponseText) If Not IsEmpty(o("error")) Then Beep ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select Else booktitle = o("name") If IsNull(booktitle) Then Beep ActiveCell.Offset(-1, 0).Select Else If IsVarArrayEmpty(o("attributes")) Then Author = "" PublishedOn = "" Else If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Author(s)")) Then Author = "" Else Author = o("attributes")("Author(s)") End If If IsEmpty(o("attributes")("Publication Date")) Then PublishedOn = "" Else PublishedOn = o("attributes")("Publication Date") End If End If Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column - 1).value = Cells(Target.Row - 1, Target.Column - 1).value Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 1).value = booktitle Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 2).value = Author Cells(Target.Row, Target.Column + 3).value = PublishedOn End If End If End Sub Function IsVarArrayEmpty(anArray As Variant) Dim i As Integer If IsObject(anArray) Then IsVarArrayEmpty = False Else On Error Resume Next i = UBound(anArray, 1) If Err.Number = 0 Then If i < 0 Then IsVarArrayEmpty = True Else IsVarArrayEmpty = False End If Else IsVarArrayEmpty = True End If End If End Function edit: you will need VbsJson from http://demon.tw/my-work/vbs-json.html http://demon.tw/my-work/vbs-json.html (why that's a chinese page I don't know all I know was it was a single file json parser that was easy to work with for this). edit2: I used this solution to scan and log 750 books in a couple of hours? Maybe 3? It went pretty quick.