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alexandrialibrary / Alexandria

Alexandria is a simple little card catalogue webapp with a terribly pretentious name.
MIT License
2 stars 1 forks source link

Start thinking about barcode scanners #50

Open hawkw opened 9 years ago

hawkw commented 9 years ago

It would be wickedly cool if we could ingest and check in/out books using a USB barcode scanner peripheral. As far as I know, the barcodes on most books should contain the ISBN (though I'm not sure about the format exactly). Therefore, it should theoretically be possible for Alexandria to talk to a barcode scanner peripheral. It may not be possible to talk to the USB scanner from web, due to perfectly reasonable sandboxing issues, but we could easily write a command line app that talks to the barcode scanner and uses the Alexandria API.

File this one under Wouldn't It Be Nice If, alongside #33.

redbassett commented 9 years ago

Already thought about. Most USB barcode scanners just use keyboard entry with a return character, so they can be used with a web form.

hawkw commented 9 years ago

Oh really? That's awesome. I had no idea.

hawkw commented 9 years ago

It looks like book barcodes actually contain EAN numbers, so this may require some munging to make work.