Well, after a bit of a foray into barcode recognition on the webcam, a friend at work talked me into buying a CueCat off eBay. Well, he had the eBay account, so he actually bought it. All of about $13 including shipping. So for that price, I decided to give up on the image recognition and just use the CueCat to scan barcodes. It’s a modified CueCat so it’s really easy – just plug into the USB port and scan, and it’s just as if you typed the barcode and pressed return.
So I looked into library software, and first tried out Alexandria. Not bad, but it crashes a lot. Really a lot. Randomly. However, it doesn’t seem to lose data, so that’s something at least. After fiddling with that a bit, I happened across Tellico. Now this is much better. It deals with all sorts of stuff – books, CDs, movies, games, etc. Everything I need to manage! But it does have some issues with getting confused about searches now and again, when I switch between ISBN and title searches and UK and US amazon. I discovered that the version in the default Ubuntu repository is quite old, so I switched to the latest and greatest. Perhaps that will improve things.
Overall though, I’m pretty impressed. I have managed to enter half of a bookshelf this evening. That’s roughly one twelfth of my books (not counting the books at work). So in a little while, look out for my library catalogue getting published online!