Over the weekend I snagged a somewhat cheap and, easily available hand-held barcode scanner – an iBall LS-162. Fairly nifty device and, works plug-n-play on Fedora.

The reason behind this was to finally collect and collate information about all the books that is stashed around me and, create a nice list based on the ISBN data. Which is here I ran into a glitch I did not anticipate. A number of the technical books which I buy (yes, in spite of the Safari, ACM and IEEE subscriptions, sometimes I do buy books) are Indian reprints and, using the ISBN to look-up the metadata isn’t working out as planned.

Does anyone have a pointer to what I should be looking the data up against ? Additionally, does anyone know of a small tool which can take in a list of ISBN numbers and, pull down the metadata for the books to output to a CSV ? I tried traditional tools like Alexandria, it did not work out. If you want a sample list of the ISBNs, leave a comment on this entry and, I’ll point you to a download link or send it over email.

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