My Google Library

One of the things I like about gmail is it's mini rss feed across the top. I find a lot of useful links there almost constantly, One that scrolled by today was a link to the official google blog for google library.

Now anyone who knows me knows I have an extensive book collection. One of the problems I have always had is cataloging all of them. I have come up with various things through the years but none that I have been very happy with. The Google Library provides some interesting possibilities.

For example I just picked up these three books today

• Deploying .net Applications With Msbuild And Clickonce
• MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536)
• NET Test Automation Recipes: A Problem-solution Approach

And I was able to turn them around and Catalog them right away.

However all is not glory and some of my books are not in there, although you can get close. For example I am old so I actually have a copy of the System V Interface Definition, issue 2 published in 1986. The ISBN on it is not unique (isn't that the whole point of an ISBN?) However Google only knows about the volume published in 1991. So I have added a couple of labels to let me know that the edition I have is actually the 1986 addition. Not perfect, but workable.

The Same trick can work for my Easton Press Books. Although not perfect, it gives an interesting way to tackle some of my cataloging needs. Now the question is that better then writing an application to use the amazon web services?

Either way, here is a link to my google library