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A few Qs. > WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN? > > If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy. You don't validate ISBNs
by buro9 13y ago
A few Qs.
> WHAT IF A BOOK DOESN'T HAVE AN ISBN?
>
> If you have a book that doesn't have an ISBN, just make one up. It's that easy.
You don't validate ISBNs? Or you need us to invent a valid one that may one day be assigned and is currently unused?
> Unlimited Books Unlimited Users €29.99 per month
I am interested in this as my girlfriend's book collection is in the order of several thousand titles.
This price point just makes this a default no go. It would take her a lot of time and effort, serious investment, to catalogue all of her books.
The primary use-case is for insurance, and a secondary use-case would be to generate bibliographical entries for her papers and work.
Both scenarios are seldom-access scenarios, and 30 EUR per month seems very excessive.
You probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet. Which has virtually no ongoing cost and can be backed up and shared easily, and Google Docs spreadsheet even means it can be managed online easily.
The only bit of value is to reduce the time to catalogue, the process of scanning the ISBN and resolving the book details from that.
Have you considered one-off pricing based on # of ISBN lookups and then a very low storage price... 30 EUR per 1,000 ISBN lookups, 10 EUR per year storage per 1,000 books.
And finally... is the ISBN database you're using a national one, or a global one? Of course ISBN is global, but some catalogues of data are country specific.
- ShaneCurran_ 13y agoThanks for the reply We validate ISBNs on our automated cataloguing feature. -- I definitely think that would be a sensible pricing model. I'll certainly look into it. Thanks for the suggestion :-) Send me an email at shane@libramatic.com and I'll see if I can sort something out. -- We use a combination of international book databases and have a 98.5% accuracy rate.
- rdouble 13y agoyou probably realise that your main competitor is the spreadsheet I've written a version of this app for my own purposes three times. Then goodreads came along. I think they are the main competitor to this sort of software right now.
- buro9 13y agogoodreads is great for discovery, but my girlfriend struggled and loathed it for cataloguing. I guess the real question is: Who is this aimed at? My girlfriend and her vast library is very likely not to be the most common use-case.
- rdouble 13y agoDid you use the mobile app? I used it to catalog about 600 books and was not amazed but it was probably the best free solution I have tried. The issue for the hobbyist developer is that the libraries to do the barcode scan on the iPhone cost money. Rolling your own is a pretty big undertaking for a niche app like this. Thus all the apps are about the same level of suck.
- DanBC 13y agoI'd have thought LibraryThing is the main competitor. (https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/)
- smegel 13y ago> 10 EUR per year storage per 1,000 books. Hold on, by "storage" we are just talking about a list of ISBNs linked to a user account? Or am I missing something?
- buro9 13y agoNo, lookups are the first cost... the value being to reduce the time taken to catalogue the library. And storage is to store and manage the database (whether manually entered or ISBN looked-up). The first (and huge) perception of value is "spare me the hours and days of typing all this junk in". The second (and lower) perception of value is "let me access my library the way I want, any time I want". Storage is a cheap thing, and of lower perceived value if seldom accessed (insurance scenario). Building the catalogue is where the time saved equates into high value.
- Someone 13y agoI agree: that price is way too high, at least for private book owners. For Mac users, the competiton is Delicious Library (http://delicious-monster.com/ http://delicious-monster.com/) for a one-time $25. Yes, that's not 'online', but is 'online' worth $300+ per year? Not to me, and I doubt I am an exception. And yes, a library could input 1M books. For that, $30/month is nothing. However, I suspect they would want features such as the ability to add metadata such as a shelf number. They also would want to integrate this into their accounting system. So, to me, this looks like a product that is too big for consumers and (still?) too small for professional librarians.