Apple Pro Mouse - <AUTHOR> http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/apple-pro-mouse <comment><USER4> An Apple mouse has come with every Mac I've bought. The first thing I do with them is throw them away. Worst mouse ever. Don't care that it is oh so pretty so very precious pretty. While I'm ranting, mice with heavy batteries aggravate carpal tunnel. Lightweight wired mice with a wheel and many buttons for the win. $9 buys a great mouse, a superior mouse that is more ergonomic. Things that harm your wrists are not ergonomic. Ergonomics and usability are not about curves and translucent plastic. And simplicity and elegance is not about having to use a second hand to press a control button on a separate device in order to access the functions of the right mouse button such as contextual menus.

<comment><USER5> Yes. And the Magic Trackpad beats any mouse for any task that is not Photoshop or gaming.

<comment><USER6> True, the trackpad is a killer once you get the handle of it.

<comment><USER7> I didn't like mine (and it was a PITA to get it), probably because there is no "resting position" like with a big mouse.

<comment><USER8> Well, I never thought of this

I just keep the base of the hand outside the lower part of the trackpad

There's also a trackpad<>keyboard hand movement as well so it doesn't stay there always.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get it. Everyone seems to be commenting saying the mouse is actually crap or not ergonomic. He says that the mouse is not the best, but it led to the creation of better things like the magic mouse. In fact, the article is about so much more than just a mouse.

The ending quote :

"But in terms of visual richness, the Apple Pro Mouse is still in a league of its own. This mouse remains as one of the most magical products I've ever seen. And the magic doesn't just come from its mystifying appearance; it's magical because it exists. For most products, clarity becomes fogged up with doubt and lack of ambition. They have no opinion, are overly apologetic as they are designed to satisfy too many people. Steve Jobs didn't believe in this approach. He made the zero button mouse a reality, and in tandem created the most simple, elegant operating system possible. The Apple Pro Mouse wants to exist in the future, where everything is intuitive. It's so much of an bullish product that it wasn't till the Magic Mouse that we truly understood what its intentions were. It's a huge statement but makes no excuses for believing in what's right. And this truly epitomizes what made Apple so special under Jobs. "

So it's more a commentary on what made / makes Apple great.

I liked this quote as well:

"Regardless of what you may think of the Apple Pro Mouse, I believe that there's something admirable about its stubbornness. It's like a masterful chef that's owned a restaurant for decades and refuses to change their ways (Sukiyabashi Jiro comes to mind). If everyone was that stubborn, society wouldn't function, but it's these people with strong beliefs that help the rest of society ground their opinions. When so much of the world produces apologetic, impartial products, we need some stuff that pushes our notions forward. The mice that Apple made were just that."

So I guess, instead of just talking about the mouse we could talk about what the article is actually about: making amazing products that have opinions and don't try to please everyone, having this vision for how things should be and just building that with whats possible! Make things that polarize people. I think there are lots of interesting statements in there, and none of them are about mice hah.

<comment><USER10> Looking good and working good are not mutually exclusive.

I like the magic mouse, but for day-to-day mousing, I use an original Microsoft Intellimouse Optical.

Another mouse that looks good but doesn't work good is the Microsoft Arc Mouse (the bendy one). Love the design. But after 15-20 minutes I'm getting cramps from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The pro mouse may have looked pretty but it was absolutely horrible in terms of functionality. When you're dragging, if you get to the edge of your mouse pad it's really important to be able to pick up the mouse and reposition it without releasing the button. This maneuver is virtually impossible when the entire top case of the mouse is a button.

<comment><USER12> That's what the little grips on the side are for - you can hold the mouse in the clicked position if you've got your thumb on one of those.

<comment><USER13> And thus we are right back in the land of unnecessary complexity

<comment><USER14> I used an Apple Pro Mouse for a while. Using the grips when picking it up just came naturally, as I recall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> saint-loup The article doesn't mention the fact that most Apple mouse have terrible ergonomics, but it contains a great anecdote on serendipitous design:

>> According to an interview by Cult of Mac with a former Apple ME, Abraham Farag, the Pro Mouse's design was born unintentionally. During a design review, Steve Jobs was shown six different models of mice to evaluate. But Jobs was instead drawn to a seventh design, an unfinished model with the buttons yet to be built in. Jobs thought the buttonless design was brilliant, and the design team played along, pretending that it was their intention from the beginning. This unfinished design became the foundation of future Apple Mice.

</comment><comment><USER15> _> Apple is a company that doesn't have a great track record for mice though. Users have always complained about the lack of a right click button and scroll wheel. This was however one of the key drivers for the simplification of Mac OS. Steve Jobs insisted that if the OS should be simple enough to be operated with just one button. _

This sounds great in theory but I don't think it works as well in practice. The great thing about a right-click mouse button is contextual menus, aka locality. For anything on your screen, if you want to know everything it can do, just right click on it.

There's no need to refer to a distant top menu bar, which only works when the app/window you're interested in is first focused, which is not something unsavy users easily pick up on. Just right click - it does both for you, focuses the window and provides all relevant functionality. Much simpler and easier for unsavy users to learn and remember.

The fact that Apple had to add a pseudo-right-click functionality in the form of holding Option or Command or whatever while clicking should have been a hint that maybe lack of easy access to a universal context menu is a bug not a feature.

</comment><comment><USER16> My eyes just really don't see any of the mice in these photos as "beautiful," least of all the Apple Pro Mouse.

These sorts of things are so subjective. Where the author sees an homage to the marbles he played with as a kid, the glare reminds me of a J.J. Abrams lens flare, distracting from the environment rather than blending in.

</comment><comment><USER17> I went to a school that was Mac heavy and I remember most of my school peeps really disliking the mouse since it made it harder to do things that they already knew how to do on Windows.

Design is great and all, but when you nerf what is/was literally the interface by which you operate a computer, it causes great frustration.

His section about stubbornness didn't resonate with me either. Sounds to me like he's just giving Apple a pass because he likes Apple. That's fine, but we should just be honest about it.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Apple Desktop Mouse II is an under appreciated looker: [http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB- ZD603_1003mi_M_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB- ZD603_1003mi_M_20131003114323.jpg)

Great Apple mouse gallery here; [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230372260...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303722604579113283259156414#1)

</comment><comment><USER19> Its amazing how pretty you can make something if you don't need to make it comfortable/functional, High heels, Bras, Sports cars, Watches and chairs.

<comment><USER20> When there's already plenty of objects that apply to the common user, there really isn't much excitement over doing simple iterations versus creating something for a much smaller audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, I was just about to mention how much I missed his podcast, The Wish List, only to discover that it looks like it might be back: They published a show on April 30 after a 16 month hiatus.

If you like discussions on design and related topics, you should check it out.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Utilizing Apple's knowledge in capacitive touch sensors used in the iPod, > they made a zero button mouse that can sense left and right clicks.

Huh. I always thought the top part had enough flex to allow clicks on either side, but the ifixit teardown shows only one switch (the component marked d2fc-7-h).

[http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/AGSiPJBxVc1RXnMh.hu...](http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/AGSiPJBxVc1RXnMh.huge)

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a great example of the reality distortion field. Apple produces probably the worst product ever designed - in every way imaginable and there's still people claiming it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a huge enthusiast of mouse and other input devices, UIs, and I've tried the Magic Mouse, as well as gaming grade mouse devices like the Logitech G9.

Here's the thing. The Magic Mouse excels at some key areas, but it's vastly inferior in some others. Overall, it ends up being worse for certain types of uses (long term, high performance).

Here's the breakdown of the Magic Mouse for various mousing tasks:

Vertical Scrolling - the Magic Mouse is hands down way better than G9 or any other mouse.

Horizontal Scrolling - Magic Mouse wins here even harder than at vertical scrolling. This is definitely one of its highlights.

Pointer tracking - it's not as good as a gaming grade laser mouse, but it's good enough. This isn't the part that makes people hate it.

Gestures - pretty good, but not as amazing as the Magic Trackpad. Better than normal mouse that have none, but "decent gesture support" is not necessary better than "no gesture support", because it should be great to be usable.

Left clicking - okay.

Right clicking - not so great. You have to physically lift your left finger so it doesn't touch the mouse surface in order to right click. This is okay to do once every 5-10 minutes, but more often than your hand will get tired really fast.

Now, here's the part that absolutely kills the mouse and the main reason why so many people dislike it, IMO.

Switching between various modes - performs really poorly compared to, e.g., Logitech G9 or pretty much any other standard mouse. Here's a worst case benchmark that showcases the weakness here: imagine you need to, in rapid succession, do a left click, right click, scroll a fixed amount, repeat. Try doing that as fast as you can on for 90 seconds on a Magic Mouse. Your hand will be extremely tired, because each of the 3 modes of operation are best performed using different hand positions. On the other hand, with a mouse like G9, your hand position is almost identical for all 3 tasks. So alternating between them is effortless in comparison.

So the bottom-line is: the magic mouse excels at some key areas (which makes some people love it), but fails really hard at some other (less noticeable to the average user) key areas and becomes really tiring to use at high performance for longer periods of time (which makes people hate it).

It's an example of Apple failing to build a "great _all around_" experience that they usually succeed at (see MacBook Pro Retina, iPhone hardware, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER25> The buried lede here is the confirmation that the Pro mouse was a mistake: Jobs' "form over function" aesthetic gone to absurd extreme.

</comment><comment><USER26> Much as I like many other things Apple makes, I haven't liked any of their mice and this version is no exception. However, I would perhaps say this one is the least-bad. I liked how clicking was simply pressing down on the whole mouse.

Even though I hate their mice I think their trackpads are great. I have no mice at all anymore.

</comment><comment><USER27> For the last quarter century or so Apple have known that their peculiar take on the mouse idea does not suit everyone. If you come from a PC or UNIX background then there are conventions regarding how the mouse works - <USER2> menu is right click, not some weird keyboard + mouse convention.

People like me have avoided the Apple product for many reasons with the mouse problem high up the list. What I don't understand is why they have offered weirder and weirder mice over the years, all with reliability problems and ergonomic woes, with no option to just get a regular mouse. They could have hooked up with Logitech and made an Apple mouse for PC users, with the buttons in the right place and a novelty fruit logo to make it look desktop-worthy. They could have charged £25 for it and, people that have avoided the Apple cult due to the weird mouse could have been brought on-board.

I know I am not alone in disliking the Apple interface, I am actually the one person that likes Ubuntu Unity, however there are lots of PC users out there that just do a job and haven't the patience/need to learn the Apple mouse oddities. At a presentation or tutorial if the machine is an Apple then the non-Apple people get stuck on basic things like using a web browser or saving a file.

I am a big fan of Steve Krug's 'Don't Make Me Think!' book:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Me-Think- Usability/dp/0321...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Me-Think- Usability/dp/0321344758)

The problem with the Apple interface choices is that it does make me think, but not in the right way. I just want to do the task in hand and not wonder why it is that you have to hold down some cryptic key on the keyboard to do a right click.

I also noted in this article how many of the failures of the various Apple mice could be ignored so easily by someone in the Apple cult. Underlying this is a problem with understanding what truly great design actually is.

That really boring Logitech or Microsoft mouse is actually great design. The ergonomics are a treat as is the reliability. They have been bold enough to make something that actually works rather than something that looks pretty.

<comment><USER28> store.apple.com sells Logitech mice and keyboards. You can just right click with a mouse in OS X, even on an Apple Magic Mouse, though it does need to be enabled in preferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The logitech trackman marble wheel is my device of choice. I like the thumbball better than a finger-operated trackball. Sadly the wired version isn't made anymore. thankfully I have 2 and they are bulletproof.

</comment><comment><USER30> Their latest mouse is pretty good for most work related stuff. I don't really like the way it handles the left mouse button, however the touch scroll wheel is very nice, and once you get the hang of the other gestures you can use, it's a bit like a trackpad that you can actually use to drag things.

I break out the Logitech with two side buttons whenever I want to actually do any gaming though. Terrible mouse for gaming with.

</comment><comment><USER31> Been using a trackpad for a year. Will never go back.

</comment><comment><USER32> This article moves towards, but doesn't really get to the fact that mice are, for may intents and purposes, over. Mobile gestures are now expected on the desktop...so trackpads are the state of the art.

</comment><comment><USER33> How about a trackball?

<comment><USER34> I'm still a little ticked about Logitech dumping their wired Trackman Wheel Optical. I love the thumb ball instead of a centered ball. I haven't tried the wireless version yet.

<comment><USER35> I have a M570 (Wireless trackball, thumb ball, as opposed to centered).

I love it. The one thing is that it loses sensitivity when gunk starts to build up - it becomes harder to move the mouse a pixel or two. But that's easily fixed by popping out the ball and cleaning it.

The other issue is that I've had to replace the primary mouse button - <USER3> microswitch died.

<comment><USER36> The M570 is a very well designed mouse. And sturdy. I've used mine heavily for about 4 years without a single issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Definitely a severe example of form over function

</comment><comment><USER38> this article becomes impossible to read to to pretentiousness.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow I thought this was a post from 2000 or something

</comment><comment><USER40> Is this a satire blog or apple worship reached new heights?

<comment><USER41> It's worship of something, but Andrew Kim isn't an Apple fanboy. If you click the "Archive" button at the top, you can see products and projects from other companies too. From the Lumia 920 extended review: _I look forward to mornings because I love the way light hits the surface. Do I have issues? Probably._

<comment><USER40> Yeah you are right. He worships junk apparently. It is a stupid blog with less content than the apple marketing material which is taken seriously by some certain readership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow, with this amount of love towards the Apple Pro Mouse you would think that it could be inserted.

edit: this site has no sense of humour

<comment><USER43> Little gag replies are risky here. Potty humor like what you've done above will never be rewarded. It's too easy. Sometimes clever puns or double entendres will get a couple of upvotes.

This is the correct behavior. Everyone is capable of making little gags, so they add little to the OP. Not a downvoter, btw.</comment></comment>


Businessman Paints Terrifying and Complex Picture of Putin's Russia - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2017/07/28/539802914/businessman-paints-a-terrifying-and-complex-picture-of-putins-russia <comment><USER2> If you wonder what's really behind that "adpotion" meeting, you owe it to yourself to watch the C-SPAN video of this.</comment>


After Netflix pays Comcast, speeds improve 65% - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/after-netflix-pays-comcast-speeds-improve-65/ <comment><USER2> If only we all had the wallet that Netflix has...</comment>


"Star Wars Open World RPG" Kickstarter Showcases Game Development Delusions - <AUTHOR> http://www.brokenjoysticks.net/2016/01/05/star-wars-open-world-rpg-kickstarter-showcases-game-development-dillusions/ <comment><USER2> It's hardly the first bizarre, unrealistic kickstarter, but I'm surprised to see how many people actually pledged to this. I assume they're doing it for lulz and counting on everybody else being smart enough not follow their example.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I love the comments in the Kickstarter. Especially the person who asked for Zombie Jedi.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mountain of books? - <AUTHOR> This really kind, eccentric guy in my neighbourhood is stockpiling books and has been doing so for years. He has an enourmous barn that he is obsessively filling with whatever reasonable quality books he can get his hands on but he is completely overwhelmed in terms of cataloging/indexing them so customers have to go through his barn sifting through cartons full of books. He charges $1 or $2 for whatever book you dig out.
He buys bulk lots from deceased estates and bookstores that are closing down. Entire shipping containers are being gifted to him and showing up at his barn. The barn is full and he is now storing in shipping containers outside.
There is great quality books among this quagmire but it takes hours of searching to find them. I figured HN might be able to point me to a solution where I could quickly photograph the front cover and have a script/google images compare the image to online info to index the title and author and then perhaps list them online...
I dunno, it just seems like such a treasure trove of books that he will sell for practically nothing because he loves books and hopes that they will find their way to people who want them - the barrier is allowing customers to find what they are looking for.
Thoughts? <comment><USER4> Please, please tag each batch of books with a unique lot number, so they can be associated with a specific estate or deceased bookstore. One or more humans spent a lot of time curating those collections. If one of the lots was well curated, then anyone who finds a book that they like will want to see the other books in that lot.

Source: people who have spent years trying to find the names of the 8,000 books in R.A. Lafferty's personal library, lost after he died. About 300 title names have been recovered, [https://www.ralafferty.org/tulsa- books/](https://www.ralafferty.org/tulsa-books/)

<comment><USER5> This would also be good when you inevitably find letters or photographs tucked between pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of these days I need to write my essay titled "Rubbish has no SKU".

I've seen a few of these, and the basic minimum difference between "pulp waiting to happen" and "bookshop" is basic shelving. Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise. Now it's possible for browsers to actually find things. When you put them on Amazon this will also help find them for shipping.

This process will also help you find the stacks of duplicates. You'll have a crate of 50 Shades and Twilight and Stephen King. The Stephen King will eventually resell; the others won't.

This page from the excellent Barter Books on their acceptance policy may be of some help: [https://www.barterbooks.co.uk/html/About%20Us/Incoming%20Boo...](https://www.barterbooks.co.uk/html/About%20Us/Incoming%20Books.php)

<comment><USER7> While I largely agree with your sentiment, I'd like to note that alphabetizing only assists those who know what they are looking for.

In a bookstore, this is a virtue. But we appear to be dealing with a book barn. Perhaps the patrons of book barn have not wandered in by accident while searching for a bookstore :)

For OP: I think you might be better off photographing the ISBN and then using a service or script to do a lookup and associate that with a cover and title. Various editions might not have their covers recorded in a database, and titles will give many dupes, but an ISBN will uniquely identify a book.

Additionally, OCR'ing stylized text is problematic. I wouldn't expect easy reading of covers, particularly of used books.

<comment><USER8> The challenge is, if the catalogued book is not immediately associated with where to find it if retrieving it later, all is in vain...

<comment><USER9> You need to stick a barcode on the location (shelf, box, etc) like they do in a warehouse. Scan the book, check it is correct, scan the location to book it in. Doesn't have a barcode, put it in another area for later. I wrote a sketch of exactly this once...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh, I am very pleased to see this request, and I may have some actual help for you.

A number of years ago a west coast startup spent quite a lot of time on a product that could identify books by their spine _image_ which I think is what you want here; finding isbns and barcode scanning them is totally impractical at this scale.

A few months before they closed up shop, I introduced them to Brewster kahle at the internet archive and convinced them to leave a copy of their database with the internet archive.

I have no idea what happened after that, but I believe they did send the data over. Machine learning is vastly different today than when they launched, and even back then they had enough data that they could get 10/12 of my books in a single photo; I really encourage you to get in touch with the archive.

The company was called bitlit then Shelfie.

As a side note I got interested because I thought it would be great to get a spine image as an api for rendering my ebooks as a library in vr/ar - I still think this would be cool.

<comment><USER11> likely the dataset never became publicly available

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/9/15235686/kobo-acquired- she...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/9/15235686/kobo-acquired-shelfie-app- readers-discounted-ebooks)

<comment><USER4> After installing the kobo app, there's no sign of the Shelfie technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        >  the barrier is allowing customers to find what they are looking for.

I am really glad that there are people like the old man who are willing to do stuff like this and people like yourself who are willing to help.

The real barrier, I think, is a bit more complicated than just being able to find stuff. It is also the fact he will be running out of space and that as more and more people find what they want the undesirable stuff (that no one wants) will just keep growing. There does need to be regular culling, I think, to keep weeding out the duplicates or books that no one wants. Also, there needs to be some effort to discover and sell the really valuable books which could produce occasional windfall funds to keep the endeavor going.

"The Book Thing" in Baltimore ([https://bookthing.org/](https://bookthing.org/)) which I have visited many times seems to be tackling this problem. It's basically a "free book" exchange. Massive. In a warehouse. It is a fairly popular place and is run by an interesting eccentric fellow with very particular ideals. I would recommend see how they do this stuff.

As for thoughts, I think that regardless of what he does, he will need one or more employees (or dedicated volunteers) to actually perform the indexing and physically organize the books.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would check out [https://www.librarything.com/](https://www.librarything.com/) also. They have a decent app for scanning barcodes and retrieve data from multiple sources. Their own database which consists of lots of imported marc records from university libraries I believe, library of congress, amazon, etc. Then they have another project librarycat where you can set up your books as a lending library.

Cataloging a large number of books is not going to be an easy process unless they are all relatively new popular books. According to librarything my library is 439 books, every few years I delete my catalog and re-import them it takes about a full weekend. Older books don't have barcodes, old paperbacks have the ISBN barcode on the inside cover. Some books don't have ISBN numbers or Library of Congress numbers. So you will still end up doing a fair amount of manual entry and searching.

<comment><USER14> Came here to also recommend LibraryThing. It's been around for 14 years, and the community has lots of similar situations to OP's. Probably a good place to look up anecdotal evidence for this kind of project, too.

LibraryThing also hooks into [TinyCat]([https://www.librarycat.org/](https://www.librarycat.org/)) which can make your database more like a library's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It may very expensive in time and resources to scan it all even if it is just the covers. You need to work out how long it takes to fetch a book from the barn or container, flatten/unbind if necessary, scan the cover, rebind, and put back. Then multiply by how many books...

I worked at a small startup in the early 2000s that somehow got massive contract to digitalise a Middle Eastern Oil & Gas company's very very extensive documentation library. We had an e-learning product where you could use a scanner to digitalise a printed book into online documentation.

Demos of scanning a book or two was really impressive. So surely scanning more than a million books/manuals/charts will be just as easy. Not quite.

Think we calculated it would take years as the bottleneck is the manual unbinding and re-binding before and after scanning. Scale that to a million and it was not the 2 months project initially forecasted. Buying more scanners and hiring more local staff scaled that part horizontally and improved the speed but still a long project.

However the client "forgot" to pay us for a few months, the bank and our accountants forgot to check and we went bankrupt soon before we really got started. Though at least I got a trip to the Middle East for a few weeks.

<comment><USER16> I think "scan" here was in the sense of "scan the ISBN to catalogue the book", not scan the insides. Since many of these are old books, many of them will not be perfect bindings. Scanning their contents therefore either requires opening the books and moving the pages (as Google Books did) or cutting the spine, which would be highly unhelpful since that would preclude any rebinding of the books into anything other than a perfect binding, reducing strength, repairability, and the ability to fold flat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Zotero (the free software reference manager) hooks into a bunch of online catalogues. You can use Zotero to manage books (I manage my own collection with it, but that's just a small personal home library of around 1000 books).

If a book has an ISBN, often Zotero will manage to find it using the magic lookup button. Just enter the ISBN (DOI's work too!) and it will usually find the book you meant. That covers about 90% of books with an ISBN.

The rest would have to be entered manually.

Zotero is not a full-blown inventory manager, but it may suit your needs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Get a barcode scanner, scan the ISBN and use that to do a API query on Amazon to retrieve title, author, category, price, etc. Store this info in a DB.

Some scenarios:

1\. Generally lookup should return something. Store these book by categories, e.g. business, children, fiction, etc. in their shelves/containers for physical browsing by your customers. The more subcategories you can do the better.

2\. If price is bigger than some threshold then store these books privately and list for sale directly in an online marketplace. There's an industry around book scalping (forgot the actual term) where traders buy books from fairs and sell online based solely on margin.

3\. The lookup returns nothing - these books are probably very valuable or worthless. Some manual action required.

I was actually considering doing something like this for remainders before, but never got it going. I'd love to know more about your eventual solution.

<comment><USER19> I'd highly suggest Calibre. [https://dearauthor.com/ebooks/dear-jane- ebooks/dear-jane-can...](https://dearauthor.com/ebooks/dear-jane-ebooks/dear- jane-can-i-use-calibre-to-manage-my-paper-books/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Goodreads has a scanner in their app (on iOS/Android) that can scan covers although for some reason it automagically adds those books into a "to-read" shelf but I guess this isn't a problem for you if you create an account for the purpose.

The API is severely rate-limited (1rps), non-standard oath and badly documented, but you should be able to get some xml out of it and parse that however you'd like.

<comment><USER21> I'm wondering about the option of having a (cheap, not worth stealing) smartphone, with the Goodreads app on it, logged in to the Goodreads account for this place. People who come in are asked to use it to scan 10 books, and move them over to the "scanned and catalogued" shelves, in addition to paying the $1 fee to get a book. Most people would be fine with that, and over time you get it all scanned.

Goodreads cannot recognize anything, but since it works on either book cover or barcode it will work on lots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A barn full of old books sounds like the perfect breeding ground for all sorts of bugs... I had an acquaintance that had a problem with bed bugs that apparently started when she got books off of those "Take one book" boxes people put on the front of their houses.

May be worth for your neighbor to check that sort of thing too. Apparently there are dogs that are trained to sniff bedbugs... those furry guys can sniff anything :-) [1]

1: [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/garden/bedbugs-hitch-a- ri...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/garden/bedbugs-hitch-a-ride-on- library-books.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> If they are recent books (from about 1980) then they probably have a barcode on the back cover, so use that. My guess is that it won't be worth trying to automatically recognise older books from the cover: a lot of them had a dust jacket, that goes missing, and a cover under the dust jacket that is not at all distinctive. The title might be on the spine, but how many online images show the spine clearly?

<comment><USER24> I tried doing a book catalog about ten years ago. I got about 80% recognition rate by using multiple numbers (ISBN, and the Library of Congress number) and multiple online data sources. It was a pretty slow process, to the point where simply keyboarding the information was easier and less error-prone, and I had to manually enter the books that didn't get any online matches anyway.

Definitely not a "scan/beep/scan/beep" kind of thing. More like "scan . . . uh, scan . . . scan, damn you, SCAN I say! (beep) Okay . . . now the first problem is that 'The Sands of Mars' which I am holding is definitely not 'Great Montana Flapjack Recipes' on B&N, let's try the library of Congress . . . . nope, not 'Annals of 1959 Steelmaking', so (tap tappity-tap...)"

<comment><USER25> The last time I looked at this (admittedly quite a while ago) the book bar code contained the ISBN.

What was causing the mismatches? Bar codes that did not contain the ISBN? Non- unique numbers?

<comment><USER26> You would be surprised to see how many books have the wrong ISBN or have a mismatch between the barcode and the ISBN. Not as much of a problem with major publishers now, but some from the 80s and 90s were hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This sounds like a use-case inventaire.io ought to support. I'll try to ask them about it. They use wikidata for filling up book metadata.

Otherwise, as stated elsewhere in this thread, Zotero can usually find books with very little information:ISBN or title. It might be worth trying to set up an OCR with it.

In any case, if you go to the length of taking a picture for each book, you might as well save them and make the dataset public, for OCR training purposes (and a second pass). There is also the mechanical Turk option if you go this way.

And as someone stated already, you should plan the physical layout in advance.

<comment><USER28> yep, inventaire.io could help there, to some extent: they could scan books barcode in bulk from the webapp [https://inventaire.io/add/scan](https://inventaire.io/add/scan) , which should find data for most books. But then it gets tricky for books without barcode/ISBN has they would probably have to fill the data manually, which can be quite some work for large inventories. No plans to add OCR, yet ;)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, judging by the response this is a problem a lot of people think about. Am overwhelmed by the helpful info. Obviously have to start at the low hanging fruit as I am working with non-technical people and am relatively non- technical myself. I just tested LibraryThing and it seems very fast and accurate so will give it a whirl.

Again, thanks HN for the overwhelming response.

<comment><USER29> I use the paid version of Books from Sort It Apps: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-list-library-isbn- scann...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-list-library-isbn- scanner/id476621639?mt=8)

All you have to do is hold the phone over the bar code for a second and it automatically downloads all the relevant information. This is by far (IMHO) the fastest way to catalog a mountain of books.

Not affiliated with the app or company in any way, just a happy user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/) and [https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/](https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/) are good resources for this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Surprised to see no mention of AbeBooks yet. We have an indie bookstore in Waterloo which is integrated with them and it seems to work pretty well. He tells me he still does most of his business in the IRL shop, but there's a steady stream of people buying online as well. Plus, it's nice for him to be able to quickly check how many of something he already has before committing to buying a bunch more of them. See: [https://www.abebooks.com/old-goat-books- waterloo-on-canada/1...](https://www.abebooks.com/old-goat-books-waterloo-on- canada/1611996/sf)

I'm not sure what options there are for hardware integrations, but Abe provides at least online inventory and ordering capabilities. I assume if you had a barcode scanner capable of acting as a USB keyboard and entering ISBNs, it would go pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER32> My plan for books is to pull the rare/valuable ones, then subscribe for the $100/mo 100 book/mo plan at [http://1dollarscan.com/](http://1dollarscan.com/) and send them all the rest, produce PDFs, and pulp the books. I have maybe 3000 books in storage and this would be preferable to anything else I've found, as I ultimately would rather consume them electronically.

<comment><USER4> 1DS $100/month is about 30 books of ~300 pages (3+ "sets" of 100 pages, rounded up).

Scanning is only worthwhile for books which are not already available in electronic form ... somewhere.

If you bought from Amazon, there's sometimes an option to get the ebook cheaply. Archive.org has many books. There are also e-books at public libraries, so it may be enough to keep a list/photos/calibre of all your titles and discard rarely-accessed books.

</comment></comment><comment> good-idea A lot of people are suggesting querying Amazon for ISBN data - another option is the ISBNdb API: [https://isbndb.com/](https://isbndb.com/) There's also the OpenLibrary API (from the Internet Archive) which may include some more info [https://openlibrary.org/](https://openlibrary.org/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't forget about the Dewey decimal system. For the books with ISBNs, you can sort them into boxes by their Dewey decimal. If you don't have time manually categorize the books without ISBNs, they can be put into "other" boxes and left unsorted

<comment><USER34> Library of Congress catalog information is more generally available, by ISBN if not already on the copyright page. For any conventionally published book since 1970.

[http://eresources.loc.gov](http://eresources.loc.gov)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> For books with an ISBN. Some of these can scan the cover

[https://www.collectorz.com/book/isbn_database.php](https://www.collectorz.com/book/isbn_database.php)

[https://bookriot.com/2016/01/14/8-reasons-catalog- books/](https://bookriot.com/2016/01/14/8-reasons-catalog-books/)

[https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/913-goodreads-hack- scan-...](https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/913-goodreads-hack-scan-a-book- cover)

</comment><comment><USER36> Photograph the books, a dozen at a time. Put a box number label next to the books. Put the books in their box, glue the label to the box. Stack the boxes.

Sort the boxes by height, line them up in a row. Put slats of wood between the rows to distribute and stabilize the load.

I wrote a program to automatically generate simple HTML files to display the images. See sample:

[http://kyber.ca/b/index.html](http://kyber.ca/b/index.html)

Use OCR to digitize title & author..

<comment><USER36> Hire Mechanical Turks or cheap offshore labor to type titles & authors from the photos (no need to ship the books).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> When I did this for my (admittedly medium sized) collection, I used Booxter ([https://www.deepprose.com/](https://www.deepprose.com/)) and a cuecat scanner to catalog all those books.

Was a simple process of having enough boxes and labels, and I did that anytime I had some free time. Scan a bunch of books, drop them in a box, slap a label on the box, wait for booxter to find and fetch the metadata, update the label in booxter and repeat.

Will take time, but is easily doable.

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 Where is that? I really would like to pay a visit...

That story also reminds me of this fellow (who actually might get me to the middle of nowhere SK): [https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadas-most- inconvenien...](https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadas-most-inconvenient- bookstore-is-a-treasure-on-the-prairies/)

(Edited to add Apple News links without ads if anyone uses it:

Free version: [https://apple.news/Ar3trUQ- cR7C-c9L3YzPYjg](https://apple.news/Ar3trUQ-cR7C-c9L3YzPYjg)

Issue version: [https://apple.news/AQD4nDgB4SKi6yTcZy60tPw](https://apple.news/AQD4nDgB4SKi6yTcZy60tPw))

There seems to be a ton of relevant help in this thread and that seems exciting.

Like someone pointed out—something like OCR might be a best first step as it seems like a data entry task at a glance.

It does sound like there may be a significant amount of physical, tedious work involved no matter what software solution you find. Sometimes you have to accept that aspect and push through. Your best bet might be to recruit some physical help there—start a fund or a labour drive or something. Recruit book lovers, etc. Seems worthwhile. Maybe he would donate books to helpers.

</comment><comment><USER38> Use one of the solutions listed below, but you HAVE to do sorting on the fly. You need to have places to put books and sort them by some general genres and you HAVE to throw out books that aren't worth the time due to damage or any other reason a book would be deemed a recyclable. With that many books, a proper library style cataloging system may be your best bet.

That being said, if you do want to do image comparison for covers, books without covers usually have a copyright page with most of the info on it. Use that to determine what a book is when the other method fails. Throwing together some cheap bookshelves with plywood and 2x4's will greatly help with the finding part, but while scanning use some big bins to do a rough sort.

And I can't stress enough you HAVE to throw out books. It's clear that there's a space issue and if he's willing to get them for free but has a hard time getting rid of them, that's hoarder behavior, not just eccentricity.

</comment><comment><USER39> that'll need a bunch of volunteers / friends to help with this work. also, check this podcast episode. might get some info / contacts [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/11/10/363103753/text...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/11/10/363103753/textbook- arbitrage-making-money-off-used-books)

once you've started this sorting / cataloging work: request visitors not to reshelf the books. have a central location (table / bins) for them to put the books, so the volunteers / barn-man can keep back in the right shelves.

also, what exactly is the barn-man's objective? just collect books and not bother about further? or, be the most helpful to book-lovers? or, make good money from these books ?

</comment><comment><USER40> simple approach would be to ask book lovers around the locality to volunteer with this task. Borrow some barcode scanners and computers. Give'em whatever books they like and it's kinda get-together for bibliophiles.

</comment><comment><USER41> Been there... since my library is now a little over a thousand physical books, and in multiple languages.

If you have a Mac, get a copy of Delicious Library ([https://www.delicious- monster.com/](https://www.delicious-monster.com/)) and a compatible barcode scanner, like the Flic.

If you have an Android phone, and you're happy with dealing with your phone and CSV export, you'll probably be okay with Libib ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.libib.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.libib.app)).

The biggest issue is that there are _tonnes_ of books (especially if like me you have older ones) that predate ISBN. That kinda sucks - but it's life.

<comment><USER42> A lot of the older ones can be looked up by their Library of Congress number, IIRC from digitizing and barcoding a school library's catalog a couple decades ago.

FWIW, that effort took a half dozen people about 3 months for somewhere on the order of 50,000 books.

<comment><USER41> 100%. But given that I want automatically - the barcode scanner integration with varying tools just doesn't do it.

The flip side is that I have books in English, French, Hebrew, and Arabic. The religious Hebrew books don't have ISBNs, unless they came from a North American publisher. The same is true of the Arabic books I have. The French on the other hand went ISBN furiously - or at least enough that it scans true :)

<comment><USER42> What percentage of each? It sounds like this book barn could use some organization in general, and sorting by language might be a good first step. Then you can scan the English and French as lower hanging fruit, and maybe recruit extra help to deal with the Hebrew and Arabic manually, or something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Sell 5 random surprise books for $15 (ex shipping). Include a box to send back any books they don't want (or any other book). Process returned books (take pictures, put barcode, register title+author). For the next order give $3 discount for every book they sent back previously.

</comment><comment><USER44> It can definitely be done but I don't know the details.

A couple times a year the local Half Price Books Outlet does a "fill a bag for $20" event and every time there are at least a couple people there with shopping carts full of bags of books.

They have dedicated bar code scanners attached to their phones and will scan books at around 1 a second. I don't know what software they are using but clearly they are looking up prices to see what they can get to sell for a profit.

I use goodreads to keep track of my own book collection and using the camera and the goodreads app usually takes 30 seconds plus to focus on the bar code and then to look it up. So whatever they are using is much faster than that.

<comment><USER45> Yep, I've seen the exact same thing at my local used bookstore on normal business days. Someone with an ISBN scanner methodically scanning every book and buying whatever the app told him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> First, is this really a problem that needs to be solved? Personally, his place sounds like my favorite kind of book shop. A lot of bookworms prefer wandering through dense forests of precariously-balanced piles of books. Is he getting those people, or is he getting people that are expecting Barnes & Noble?

If they really do need to be cataloged, then the next thing is to forget all about trying to inventory the entire thing. Instead, you're going to partition the collection into "easy to catalog" and "hard to catalog": pick a section of the barn and make this the organized area. Get a barcode scanner ([https://www.newegg.com/Barcode- Scanner/SubCategory/ID-583](https://www.newegg.com/Barcode- Scanner/SubCategory/ID-583)) and throw together a quick API client that'll take an ISBN and display a title, author, edition, and picture. If it comes up correct, great: book goes into the cataloged section. If it doesn't, it goes somewhere else. Make it really simple, so that a single keystroke can accept that book into inventory.

Grocery stores have to regularly inventory everything on the shelves. I worked for an outfit once that wanted to do it all in-house, so we bought the commercial Telxon handheld wireless devices and I set about figuring out their software. Turned out that they just wanted to speak basic telnet to a server at a pre-configured IP address, so I put together a sloppy little telnet server interface and staff were able to count the entire store right on the devices in a few hours. That's way more complicated than what you'll need to do, so, y'know, your thing is doable. You'll have the added benefit of free online book databases and better hardware and easier-to-hack-together software.

Also might not be a bad idea to talk to your local librarian. They're book nerds too and he or she might have an actual library science degree. This would be right up their alley.

<comment><USER47> > Also might not be a bad idea to talk to your local librarian. They're book > nerds too and he or she might have an actual library science degree. This > would be right up their alley.

I second this. Also, maybe check with university libraries or university MLS/MLIS programs (Masters of Library Science). This is not a new problem, and they would be aware of existing tools/methodology. Also, maybe you could get a grad student/intern to help.

<comment><USER48> Smartphones of both flavours can load cheap or free apps that are quite effective enough to read barcodes and identify books. Librarything and its various catalogue tools can help with the metadata too. That said, the advice to get specialist help is well-founded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I am also grading books in my kids library. They don't have a librarian and they have a stack of 1,000 books that have been donated.

I am grading them by reading level A-Z. Currently I am googling the book and then adding "reading level" to the end and then if it has it, it will show up, or I can find the Lexile number and use that as a grade also. I am using the speech to text command in google, so it doesn't take that much time.

This is a hassle and am looking into other ways to speed up this process. And or get other parents to volunteer if it was an easier process.

</comment><comment><USER50> You also ask at the forum of

[http://diybookscanner.org/](http://diybookscanner.org/)

Perhaps there are users with experience...

<comment><USER51> I second DIY Book Scanner. I don't own one but I did scan a book once with it. The scanning part is incredibly fast. I'm sure there are solutions out there for creating a PDF (with OCR).

<comment><USER50> Once upon a time (years ago) i wrote a tool called bookbuilder, which did exactly this :-) Take a bunch of camera photos of a book on dark background, find the edges and extract the text part :-) I'm not sure, it is still working, because it was java 6... but it is using the excellent boofCV library ([http://boofcv.org](http://boofcv.org)) If you would like to try it, give it a shot (tesseract 3 is needed):

[https://mega.nz/#!EVxA0ZoD!6Uy5A4HexJbewXqkOLsW-4sj5IO5LOGef...](https://mega.nz/#!EVxA0ZoD!6Uy5A4HexJbewXqkOLsW-4sj5IO5LOGefTfN0z-acQE)

java -jar bookbuilder-0.2.jar --input-path=input --output- file=output/output.pdf --ocr-embed-layer --rotation-degrees=180

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> There's a whole universe of folks selling used books on Amazon FBA. I suggest start with a google search of exactly that.

There's apps which allow you to scan UPC codes and look up a price on Amazon. I'd personally sort the books by market value. Sell the books that are profitable, trash the ones which are not, save the ones which are very rare or have no UPC code, and use the money to grow the storage space.

<comment><USER53> Except you're talking about a guy who seems to be happy getting containers filled with almost certainly worthless books. I doubt his values and yours are aligned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I have a related problem on a much smaller scale (only a few hundred books) in that I wish to make full digital copies of my books. I reached out to Archive.org but they can't use them due to copyrights. I'm looking into [https://1dollarscan.com/](https://1dollarscan.com/) but it's a destructive scanning technique.

</comment><comment><USER55> While we are a bit on this topic: is there a alternative to calibre [1] for managing a shitload (50000+) of ebooks which is still performant? Specially ebooks which have no ISBN (PDF, whitepapers, etc) which only information about them is in their EXIF file data.

[1] [https://calibre-ebook.com](https://calibre-ebook.com)

<comment><USER4> Performant for which function? Searching? Parsing metadata from imported files? Manual editing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I raised the same question several years ago on this very forum. I got some good answers but none that ultimately satisfied my needs, but they could be useful for you: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9631362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9631362)

</comment><comment><USER57> I worked for a company that scanned and catalogued many books in the '00s. There's two primary challenges to solve, nondestructive scanning and speed.

1\. In order to get a good scan (back then) we had to lay each page flat against a piece of glass (no matter the orientation). This tended to damage or destroy the binding by the time scanning was complete.

2\. An average of ten seconds per scan (from page flip to page flip) is blazing fast (including rescans). For a 200 page book this is 33 minutes. To scan a library of 200 books at this rate requires 3.2 man years of work (normal 40 hour work week + holidays).

One way to speed this process drastically is to use a bulk scanner. This requires slicing the binding off the book and feeding in the book as a stack of pages, scanning the cover separately. Obviously this completely destroys the book.

Good luck.

<comment><USER58> These days, using a couple of dedicated hi-res cameras may be a much faster way to aquire the page images

A scanner's workbench could be rigged with screens for live preview and QC. Then assemble/OCR in software. The main manual task is page turning, the rest could be fixed (light, exposure, alignment etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This would be my MVP: I'd implement simple inventory app based on ISBN scanning and simply enumerated boxes with, say, 50 books each. Scan ISBN - <USER2> in the next empty box, take another box when full, and so on. Then based on title demand, I'll sort popular titles in their own boxes.

<comment><USER36> 20 to 25 books is about the max that can be comfortably lifted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I work with scanning documents for business purposes. I went to sales meeting with a company called Biels, which has now been bought and is called Instream.

While at this meeting they were displaying a book scanner that you could place in the machine, it would flip each page then take a high resolution photo, and had options for OCR software wihich would read the entire page and present any questionable words or characters the OCR could not identify. This machine and software was pitched to Museums and large libraries. I would highly suggest asking a local Museum or Library if they have any hardware that would be able to archive the books your describing.

I tried searching for the exact machine but I could not locate it, I want to say Canon was the vendor.

I wish success with your en devour.

</comment><comment><USER61> Use a OCR service such as Firebase ML Text kit or the Amazon's similar offering or something and take pictures cover by cover, ping an API - <USER3> amazon or ebay might do to see if it exists and price of the book on average.

It also shouldn't be hard to up the speed by taking pictures of a stack of books - if you take an image of a stack of books and crop it book by book, training models to recognise books shouldn't be that hard but you could also use a CV solution (firebase, amazon, azure again) and then from the books it found in the stack ping the API for each one. This could probably be the fastest way if you can take a panorama and have it search from that.

Anyways, if you do it - try to get the price, ISBN and editions from the results.

</comment><comment><USER62> I used Tellico to scan my library, it can automatically lookup the books from Amazon with their ISBN if you have a barcode scanner (else you have to type them by hands...)

[http://tellico-project.org/](http://tellico-project.org/)

<comment><USER26> Amazon shutdown that API last fall, I think. I've been using one of tellico's other options since then. (I don't remember which offhand.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Dump them all in a shredder. Blow the shreds through a well-lit tunnel full of digital cameras. Assemble the books from the images. Now it's just a software problem.

(This isn't my idea. Either Rudy Rucker, Vernor Vinge or Cory Doctorow thought it. I forget exactly who.)

<comment><USER64> The ham-handed Librareome digital preservation project from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End

>> "The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder". The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel" ... thousands of books that had already been sucked into the "data rescue" equipment"

<comment><USER63> Has anybody tried that? It seems like a fun software problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> LibraryThing has an app, or you can order a CueCat scanner. [https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Adding_and_importing...](https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Adding_and_importing_books)

</comment><comment><USER8> Google has a Books API. Look into that. There are smartphone apps that solve the problem of books that have barcodes. No matter what, this will be a huge task to complete. I scanned my small library (2-3 shelves) and was quite tired of it in the end.

</comment><comment><USER66> Surprised that no-one has produced a Vivino-alike scanner for books.

(Although I suspect the range of book covers is somewhat larger than the range of wine labels...)

[https://www.vivino.com](https://www.vivino.com)

</comment><comment><USER67> My thought is that the entire point of an old fashioned second hand book shop is to be able to wander around and explore. IF everything is catalogued, his barn instantly turns into a very bleak version of Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER68> Tangential anecdote:

I once entered used-book store looking for and old math book. Noone there except a grumpy looking man with a wild hair and a big beard sitting at a desk in the far corner.

I start browsing the shelves.

"WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?"

"Um, eh, Play with Eternity."

"WE DON'T HAVE IT."

</comment><comment><USER69> Not sure if this will help - [https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/](https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/)

<comment><USER70> Using computer vision may provide a good enough result for this use case. An interesting approach would be to segment the book piles and bulk scan the spines. There are projects that already tackled this problem:

[https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ben- shahar/Teaching/Computational-...](https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ben- shahar/Teaching/Computational- Vision/StudentProjects/ICBV151/ICBV-2015-1-PavelRubinson/index.php)

Won't be as accurate as barcode scanning, but will be definitely less time consuming.

<comment><USER71> That's fantastic. I was after a similar solution and after playing with OpenCV, I can see how they put the pieces together.

Annoyingly, I was trying to scan multiple books in charity shops, when one of my favourites started putting their own stickers directly over the barcode (when it existed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I have experience working with document storage business. You need to barcode and index all books. Barcode all locations and scan all books to that container they are. It will be like an excel table with 3 columns. Book name, barcode (ISBN or smth) and location barcode. If someone will look up from the catalog you will know the location. If they have ISBN it's possible to write a script to pull book info by it.

</comment><comment><USER73> A while back i wrote an ISBN barcode scanner which would lookup the item on amazon and fond the price, the script would use your webcam as the source for the image, im sure you could adapt it to your needs, its very simple and has minimal error checking so beware.

[https://github.com/bshep/ISBNbarcodescanner](https://github.com/bshep/ISBNbarcodescanner)

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm surprised nobody mentioned [https://www.libib.com/](https://www.libib.com/). It comes with a mobile app that has a barcode scanner with an option for manual entry.

Yes, some older books, especially in languages other than English, are not in its database, leaving you with the manual option, but it will let you index the books that are there in no time.

</comment><comment><USER75> For books that are not that old, you will often find the info you need on the copyright page - for US publications, the Library of Congress CIP info is there; see [http://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/](http://www.loc.gov/publish/cip/) . Other countries have similar programmes eg the British Library does the same.

</comment><comment><USER76> You might try Delicious Library: [https://delicious- monster.com](https://delicious-monster.com)

<comment><USER77> I was going to second that; it's the first thing that came to my mind—but then it doesn't work for books without barcodes (or does it now?). I worked with version 2 a while back, it was great. The iPhone app to scan books without the laptop nearby requires version 3 though. The Mac app could also check the price the book sells for online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Internet archives? [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes- televisi...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-television- news-archive?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas- page&fbclid=IwAR161Fm3Bu3aJ-0w6QP6_XLvpO0x9E80ZfyjKc-sW65zwz7I4-Z2BzhgtWA)

</comment><comment><USER79> My local library has a 24/7 return system. You simply put the books on a conveyor belt and it takes them in and scans them. I imagine it reads the RFID but you could get a similar system to scan the barcode, you just have to insert them back side up. Would be quicker than scanning with a handheld barcode scanner.

</comment><comment><USER80> Please do let me know more regarding your pain points. I released [http://mybooklist.club](http://mybooklist.club) Obviously it already includes manual insert and barcode scanning but now i'm working to implement adding by image recognition (of the cover).

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a complex project, though also a well-developed space -- it's much of what libraries do.

Numerous queryable catalogues of book and other matrials exist, with Worldcat arguably the most developed of those:

[https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web- services/classify...](https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/web- services/classify.en.html)

The US Library of Congress also has a huge (if intimidating) amount of information available.

[http://eresources.loc.gov](http://eresources.loc.gov)

[http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/library-of-congress-free- recor...](http://fortune.com/2017/05/17/library-of-congress-free-record- release/)

Figuring out what you hope to accomplish, how, with what resurces (people, software, equipment, space, etc.), in what timeframe, and with what throughput (how fast are materials arriving and leaving, whatis the current backlog) are all considerations. And what end this will serve; book sales, in-person or online, and what is sufficient to that end is also significant.

<comment><USER34> Abebooks has a freely-available inventory-management system, HomeBase: HomeBase is AbeBooks' free inventory management software and one of the most widely adopted programs for booksellers worldwide.

 _This easy-to-use program streamlines inventory management and bookselling on AbeBooks. HomeBase helps take care of everything from maintaining your inventory database, keeping track of buyers and issuing receipts, to uploading your active listings to sell on AbeBooks. Plus, you can also use HomeBase 3.0, to send your inventory to other marketplaces such as Amazon._

[https://www.abebooks.com/homebase/software-inventory- managem...](https://www.abebooks.com/homebase/software-inventory-management- system-catalog/index.shtml)

There's a longer list of software and tools here:

[https://www.whiteunicornbooks.com/home/bookinventoryprograms...](https://www.whiteunicornbooks.com/home/bookinventoryprograms.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Maybe look into how public libraries get books back onto shelves [https://www.bibliotheca.com/library-return- sorting/](https://www.bibliotheca.com/library-return-sorting/)

</comment><comment><USER82> [http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/vision/BFS- Auto/](http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/vision/BFS-Auto/)

though this is to scan whole books in case there are rare ones..

</comment><comment><USER83> The amazon seller app does exactly this. I think eBay might have it built in as well, but I'm fairly certain with amazon you can scan the barcode or cover of a book.

</comment><comment><USER84> Ideally you'd just do a pass through with a high res video camera, generally make sure the book spines are facing out to capture their names, run it through some image filter to pickup the book names.

Then you'd have to run some algo to match the name with the isbn and tag it with the general location.

Once you get the process down you could run a new video every few weeks.

This is kind of like Google Street view for the book barn.

Am I dreaming? Could this work on practice.?

</comment><comment><USER85> The easiest way by far is to download Goodreads and use the barcode scanner in their app and their lists feature.

</comment><comment><USER86> Google docs will ocr.

At a first parse, just take a picture of a whole bunch of books spines. Some will be ok, some not.

</comment><comment><USER87> You should ask on reddit on r/DataHoarder. They are the best for this kind of stuff.

</comment><comment><USER88> Maybe light hardware scanner will be helpful, something like workers use in warehouses.

</comment><comment><USER89> 1st, where is this treasure trove?

2nd, barcode scanning would certainly be the most effective method.

</comment><comment><USER90> Photograph the spines of the books on the shelves and OCR the titles and authors?

</comment><comment><USER91> You could scan the barcodes and use something like TELLICO to make a catalogue

</comment><comment><USER92> Yep, charge each customer 1$ + at least 5 casual books indexed into a database

</comment><comment><USER93> i would recommend to check with archive.org, if the books are already available online and if not if they are interested scanning or get the scans.

</comment><comment><USER94> Ask a professional. And by that I mean - get in touch with Jason Scott: [https://twitter.com/textfiles](https://twitter.com/textfiles)

<comment><USER95> If we say books and professional, I think of the Internet Archive. They developed their own software which is used on the TT Scribe system, see [https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem](https://archive.org/details/tabletopscribesystem). These people run an amazing operation, but even for them this still involves a lot of manual labor. In the end, what it takes is a person to grab a book and type in the title.

<comment><USER34> Jason Scott is the Internet Archive's Free Range Archivist.

<comment><USER96> HI

<comment><USER97> Is it true what vessenes said above about the Internet Archive receiving a dataset of book spines? And would it be possible for the IA to release that dataset publicly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So where is this barn of books?

I'd like to have a look. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER98> Hay On Wye is a town known for the book shops in Wales. Maybe this is the business model that you need to look into.

What Hay on Wye is known for is a literary festival. So there was a pivot to this a few decades ago that has worked.

This is the guy that started it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Booth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Booth)

Note the way it started, buying library stock from America that was available due to libraries closing.

Some of the Hay book shops are really good, there is a former cinema that you could get lost for hours in. Some other book shops are more like 'extras'. They might have books in cases on the pavement with prices being pennies. This stuff could be fairly pulped, but, collectively it gives the whole town this aura of literature that is way beyond what the local sheep farmers necessarily go in for.

Now if a tourist visits Hay for the festival then they spend £££ on books but they also spend a lot more on cups of tea, admission fees to see performances, accommodation and whatever else. A given tourist might spend pennies on books but in so doing spend many pounds in the town. They might not even read the books purchased, they might become more souvenir value, and far from generic souvenirs.

The reputation from the festival is enough to bring a respectable amount of tourists to Hay throughout the rest of the year.

It also works with a sponsor, normally the Hay festival works with people who have a vested interest in it being successful, so you get a lot of coverage on BBC's Radio 4.

Hay also has splendid scenery going for it as well as it being in Wales, proper. There are towns nearby that are just as pretty with similar scenic backdrops but nobody remembers the names of those places. The books thing - which is the effort and inspiration of one man - has put the place on the map, literally.

So, rather than the high tech solution, maybe the preinternet solution has some pointers. Get some local store fronts that are closed premises to become book shops. Segment the collection so that some shops are more specialist than others. Have some shops in less prime locations so that collectively there is the same thing going on as with Hay on Wye. Create a fake literary hub and then make it into a real literary hub by putting on the ten day festival.

If you get the council and local businesses in on the act then you might be able to get the whole thing started. Build it and they will come works for Hay even though it is the middle of nowhere with just sheep for local population.

Trying to shift the product online for a pittance is no fun at all, the festival and tourist location thing could be much more exciting. Try and twin the town with Hay to get started...

<comment><USER17> > […] has put the place on the map, literally.

I'm pretty sure Hay On Wye was quite literally on a lot of maps before that. _Figuratively_ speaking you are probably correct.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup (TasksOnSteroids) - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody,
it would be great if you could take a look at my goal- and task-management website, http://www.tasksonsteroids.com.
It's a website for all those who are interested in optimization of their goal- and task-management using the three methods - Task Management Matrix (aka Eisenhower Matrix) - Dreamlining (made known by Tim Ferriss in his book "4-Hour Workweek") - Bucketlist (a list of 100 goals, like in the movie "The Bucketlist")
Would be great if you could give me some hints what I could do better on this site.
Many thanks in advance. Chris <comment><USER2> Nice concept and design (the home page, at least), but I haven't read any of those books. The terminology is foreign and confusing for someone like that. Why exclude them? Better to put the 'inside baseball' in a tooltip and stick to plain English in terms of prioritizing the tasks/goals.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the fast reply. I will try to change the terminology. Would be great if you could tell me, what terms were confusing for you?</comment></comment>


Nginx UI – Access and modify the Nginx configurations files without CLI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schenkd/nginx-ui <comment><USER2> I'm using this [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/nginx](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/nginx) that I find it pretty good

<comment><USER3> Oh sweet! Didn't know about this. Would have definitely helped when I was getting my Django app working on DO and was using NGINX for the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks basically like a web-based text-editor. More effort needs to be put into adding UI controls for modifying common settings, or at least some macros for adding settings to a config file. (e.g. insert a common setting at cursor location). Better yet, hide editing the config file in an "advanced" mode, and allow UI controls (checkboxes, input boxes, and dropdowns) for editing parts of the config. (that's what I thought this was going to be).

<comment><USER5> what's the goal of that? Which person needing to configure nginx does not know how to edit text?

<comment><USER6> I imagine that if you are creating a web interface, with the associated risks it carries (login, vulnerabilities, permissions), the interface should have some advantages over just going into the terminal and editing the same files in the same way.

In fact, by reading the motivation of the project in the README, it seems that the problem it solved was the authentication part of it, and replaced it with... no authentication?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This appears to be a simple UI wrapper over the nginx CLI more than a config generator (like what DigitalOcean has). It's basically an assortment of text boxes for editing the config and then buttons for applying it.

</comment><comment><USER8> There are also more feature rich control panels:

[http://ajenti.org/](http://ajenti.org/)

[http://vestacp.com/](http://vestacp.com/)

For some use cases, these can feel bloated, so I understand there could be room for a more minimalistic option.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is certainly a good effort but I've yet to use a web ui to manage web server configs, especially these days when we're moving most of the configuration to code and version control. We usually deploy changes to a test server to test the changes and then move on to production.

<comment><USER10> Adding a UI doesn't require you to take config out of your IaaC setup, it could Increase accessibility to logs, monitoring, security warnings, versioning, etc, that your IaaC might be strongly lacking. There are weaknesses to IaaC that a tool like this may supplement.

<comment><USER11> That's true if the UI is a read-only dashboard. If the UI can affect behavior then you don't have IaaC anymore.

<comment><USER12> Only if you have zero discipline.

<comment><USER13> People make mistakes. Relying on people to have perfect discipline and make no errors results in incidents in production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice way to shoot yourself in the foot if you manage configs without version control

</comment><comment><USER15> 10 years young me would have liked having something like this. Nowadays any manual configuration is a big no-no. All my configuration parsing and building happen in the CI pipeline in an automated manner.

<comment><USER16> It can give beginners a place to start. Until you have that critical base of understanding it can seem very frustrating starting from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you use this, you lose the ability to version control, which is the most important feature of text files.

I'm not against generating configuration, but that should not require an always-running instance.

<comment><USER18> I think version controlling configuration is important.

I don't understand why you think a GUI necessitates losing version control though, or why you think version control is a "feature" of text files.

If you need version control of always-running live-changing nginx configuration then you can run `nginx -T` to dump the parsed configuration to stdout. Just save that to version control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Containerization is now state of the art and therefore the application is delivered in a container."

I wouldn't say it is "state of the art". Solaris had containers in 2004/2005.

<comment><USER20> "State of the art" doesn't really indicate age. It just means that there's nothing better. I'd be interested in learning about anything that's better than containers.

<comment><USER19> state of the art /ˌstād ə(v) T͟Hə ˈärt/

phrase of state

the most recent stage in the development of a product, incorporating the newest ideas and the most up-to-date features.

incorporating the newest ideas and the most up-to-date features.

"a new state-of-the-art hospital"

<comment><USER21> newest =/= new

something can be quite old, but if nothing has replaced it, it's still "newest" and "most up-to-date"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> NginxProxyManager is the preferred choice in the Unraid (home server) community - good to have another contender to help nginx n00bs like myself.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there any security model for this? Or does having access effectively give you complete root control?

<comment><USER12> Presumably you can set the file root to anything you want.

Maybe do script injection by doing some fancy file loading? Not sure how much nginx config language allows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Weird. Not sure why i would like to update/change a live config.

That would probably not mean that there is an Infrastructure code in git.

<comment><USER25> Well i have 1M+ users and still ssh into the VMs and live-change nginx configs. Once in a while the reload fails because i messed up something.

<comment><USER26> I have over 100k uniques daily, 7 servers and I also change nginx config manually via ssh.

<comment><USER24> But why?

Even if you don't use kubernetes or docker images, you do wanna have it in code right?

Having something like ansible would do the same thing but allows you to have your config backuped by git and allows you to recreate the env without any issues.

How do you keep your mean time to recovery low? How do you document your setup? How do you automated tests if you change your config manual?

<comment><USER26> Why not?

I have done this for 10+ years and it's still working flawlessly, I don't see a reason to add more complexity to something that is working fine for my needs. I don't have to change config often, maybe once a year or so.

<comment><USER24> " I don't see a reason to add more complexity to something that is working fine for my needs" valid point though.

I would do it due to: \- keeping 'meantime to recovery' low due to having my configs in git -> fast recovery \- using something like ansible for your small case to have it in git (instead of a shellscript) -> backup \- perhaps a jenkins pipeline with testing the config before applying it automatically -> for quality \- automatisation for having fun with it, seeing what is out there besides ssh and manuel editing

At the end of the day, i assume that this automatisated process is also less dependend from myself. So i'm not sure who is doing things when you are on holiday or sick.

I'm now having a small k8s cluster at home. I have never had anything which allows me to have my whole setup in git so easy with autohealing, domain management and high availability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Their user case seems a bit weird to me. If a new application is deployed, can you not make changes to the nginx config locally and redeploy it? That way everyone has access and it'll be part of the usual merge request -> review -> merge flow.

If anything this tool makes editing easier and may lead to more misconfiguration.

</comment><comment><USER28> Neat! Felt a little nostalgic seeing reading the title as it was a somewhat big emphasis as the "next thing to do" when I was part of the NGINX Amplify team.

In case you didn't know, the configuration parsing library we created for the NGINX Amplify agent is open source under Apache 2.0:

[https://github.com/nginxinc/crossplane](https://github.com/nginxinc/crossplane) (credit to @aluttik who was the primary author)

It parses an NGINX configuration files into JSON and vice-versa.

</comment><comment><USER29> IMHO, I might as well just use Vim. Maybe this has a use case, it's not for me. I literally need to type just one line and and press enter:

        sudo vi /etc/nginx/...

<comment><USER30> Generally speaking, a UI DOES have a use case - when you can't be bothered to learn the configuration language and its keys / values / nuances. The UI can help you create a sane and safe config, instead of having to scour the internet for - potentially outdated - information.

Mind you, I've had more trouble with that with Apache given how they changed their config files around on multiple occasions.

<comment><USER31> I'd argue that if you are neither willing nor able to learn nginx's config file format, you should not be configuring nginx. The default config has example blocks with comments anyway. If that's not enough, nginx maintains current documentation. But if you're configuring a web server (or anything, for that matter), you should take some time to learn how to configure it.

<comment><USER32> This. I never understood the "every idiot can do it gui server" thing, just because everybody can doesn't mean everybody _should_.

Have we already forgotten how Microsoft Exchange singlehandedly launched an entire spam industry?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> From what i gather, this is a Deployment & editor software for nginx specifically. At work I've setup a pipeline using Azure Devops (also done it with Gitlab) that achieves the same thing. And I'm guessing it can be done with the other popular build & deploy tools such as Jenkins and . So i wonder, who is this for?

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd rather track it in the repo and let the pipeline deploy it. No need to modify it by hand.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just loved it, docker is a good choice but I would've love to have non- docker version as well.

<comment><USER36> Well, the Dockerfile says exactly how to start the software and how to install all the packages etc. locally, so why not use that? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is wrong with the current config via CLI?

Edit file, reload... Voilà

</comment><comment><USER38> how many cooks does one need in the kitchen, to continuously re-configure a single nginx server? His described use case seems like a strange setup.

<comment><USER39> And you'd think there'd be some automated pipeline that would deploy and reload nginx configs. That would be usable by all environments, from lab to prod, and would go through code review. A UI anyone can just go in and switch stuff for prod seems like a weird solution to the use case.

Nonetheless they had a problem, they fixed it and they shared the solution when they could've just kept it.</comment></comment>


Free-market thinkers embracing radical-sounding ideas to shore up capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/bleeding-heart-libertarians-reason-zwolinski-capitalism-occupy-market-socialism-fox/ <comment><USER2> I could barely read this article. It reminded me of this: [http://www.pagepulp.com/wp-content/academia.jpg](http://www.pagepulp.com/wp- content/academia.jpg)</comment>


CSS Panic: Game written in HTML/CSS - no Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://jsdo.it/GeckoTang/4rXg <comment><USER2> There are more than 6000 lines of CSS behind this, but only the first 500 or so are actual CSS; the rest appears to be images encoded into text.

At any rate, this is very impressive and interesting. I would have sworn it was a Flash game if I didn't know better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Works well in webkit-based browser (Chrome 12 and Safari 5 tested). This is due to the extensive usage of -webkit-animation-, -webkit-pointer- and -webkit-transform-.

The crocodiles are radio buttons and animations are controlled via the _:checked_ pseudo-selector, very clever.

</comment><comment><USER4> As soon as I click play/replay, I get the message Game Over :-) I am using FF4 on Mac

<comment><USER5> doesn't work in my ff5 also (mac).

<comment><USER6> Likewise on FF7 nightly (mac)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very clever work.

But we're back to the days of "works best in so-and-so browser".

(no FF3/4 or IE9 or Opera11 support)

<comment><USER8> They never went away, a pure css game is very obviously not going to work in ie6, there is nothing for it to degrade to, some people push the standards (mostly fun experiments) and some people have to be very careful about browser support (the amazons of the world)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How can one implement game logic and AI in CSS? I thought CSS can do nothing much other than styling except mouse hover property which gives some interactive elements without JS.

<comment><USER10> It has no AI, the croc's movement is scripted. CSS can do a lot more than changing style on mouse hover. Check out the pseudo-elements, the transitions, the :target selector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Works fine in Chrome 11 under linux

</comment><comment><USER12> Very clever.

How is the randomness produced?

<comment><USER13> There isn't any randomness involved. Everything is defined to slide in/out at specific intervals. Once you click an alligator (either with or without sunglasses), that alligator is hidden for the rest of the game. The other alligator continues on sliding in/out at the specified duration for each cycle (there's about three cycles for the game...) until you click it as well.

However, the game does have a feel of randomness do the the different speeds of sliding and the multiple instances of an alligator sliding in/out during a cycle. It's very nifty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't work on IE9 either. Thus we see the flaw in designing programs in html/CSS there is no guarantee that what you wrote is what will happen/appear on a browser. Even worse than an untyped language. A programming language that has the programmer "suggest" commands rather than demand them.

<comment><USER2> Yes. Welcome to web development. :)

Snarkiness aside, I feel the pain behind your complaint. That's one reason I think CSS can be harder than actual programming: you have all these unknowns and contingencies to manage.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened with tinyproj.com? - <AUTHOR>

Have the submissions died down? Would be interested to hear if it still maintained life after it's launch here weeks back. <comment><USER2> Kyle gave a response to this question two days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3211965></comment>


Roominate: A Building Toy for Girls - <AUTHOR> http://www.roominatetoy.com/ <comment><USER2> The US is really weird when it comes to gender roles. When I was growing up Legos were gender-neutral, and by the time I was in college it seems like Legos were gender-coded. And there were almost no girl lego people :(

The color-coding is not my thing but might be subversive enough to help it get through to girls who are enforcing pinkness on themselves and others.

Three things (I'd like to see): * ship extensions with Raspberry Pi or Arduino integration! How cool would it be if your fan went on only when it's hot or the roman shades went down when it got sunny? * make a little solar panel kit extension for real, so on a sunny day you can have a solar-powered dollhouse.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know. It feels kind of pink lego to me (the marketing successes of which aren't lost here). When my daughter (now 2) gets just _this_ much bigger, I'll probably find myself showing her Adafruit.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with the product itself... more that it's clearly pushing itself exclusively toward girls. My son would _love_ this thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why can't we just give them meccano and Lego the same as the boy kids?

<comment><USER5> Many of the parents I know report that despite their best efforts, their kids display a powerful innate tendency towards gendered behaviour. So I guess engineering toys "for girls" might be met with greater enthusiasm, even if they're basically the same as boys' toys.

It seems to me that there is a slightly problematic relationship between "toys for girls" and the "anti-pinkification" movement though.

<comment><USER6> My equally scientific observation is that the tendency comes from the parents. However, it doesn't matter from the perspective of a toy maker, there is a market to be filled, and they seem to go after it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a strange name. It reminds me of ruminant[1], but maybe it's because I'm a not a native English speaker.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant)

<comment><USER8> My guess is that the name is a play on "ruminate", which originally meant "to chew the cud" as ruminant animals do. However, long ago it came to also mean "to think deeply about", as if a person might be "chewing" some information in an attempt to digest it. I'm assuming they mean the latter meaning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Girls can do wonders with duct tape, craft sticks, paper, scissors, clay, pipe cleaners, and blocks. I am sure boys are good at it too. These toy sets are almost a step back from the crafts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Instead of wasting money on this sexist crap, build a real dollhouse with your kids from scratch. The process involves the whole family and has interesting parts for any gender.

</comment><comment><USER10> Roominate is to Erector Set, as GI Joe was to Barbie.

<comment><USER11> An agitated younger me: "Listen. They're not dolls! They're ACTION FIGURES."</comment></comment>


Instrument Your Business - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/02/10/instrument-your-business

<comment><USER2> It's a good premise, but suggestions seem very basic. Any advanced suggestions or case studies?

I'll volunteer one - I keep track of hours spent on tech support and make sure the number goes down over time. This requires bug fixing, usability changes, or sometimes even adding features that are so frequently requested it's easier to add them than explain why you won't.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the word 'Frankly' too popular in TEDx talks? - <AUTHOR> To be Frankly I never heard so many times the word "Frankly" anywhere else than TEDx talks.
Don't you think so? Why?
P.S. Try and google 'tedx frankly' <comment><USER2> Yes

</comment><comment><USER3> To be frank, unsure of whether complaining about poor grammar or word overuse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not complaining, I just wondered if it's just me. Apparently not</comment></comment>