Book Vs. ScannerBook Vs. Scanner

I like to think that I'm an organized person, but I'm really not. My basement is nearly drowned in piles and piles of books that are in great need of organization. However, every time I go down there to start, I'm overwhelmed by the prospect. So when I got to review the Flic Scanner Media Organizer -- a package containing a small, handheld scanner and three applications from Collectorz.com for tracking music, books, and DVDs -- I was ecstatic. This was it. Order out of chaos. We were finally going to get those shelves upon shelves of volumes accounted for and organized so that we could actually find a book when we wanted to.Unfortunately, when you assume that technology is going to solve all your problems, the usual result is that it is actually only part of the answer. In this case, it turned out that the ISBN numbers that were being read by the scanner were a bit different in the older volumes -- 13 numerals instead of 10 -- and we're not even talking about books old enough not to even have bar codes on the covers. In other words, technology when applied to the printed page has its limitations -- and I'd run straight into them.

This wasn't the case, of course, with the more recent music CDs and film DVDs, which worked quite nicely with the scanner/software combination. But those of us who deal with technology on a day-to-day basis tend to sometimes forget that not everything has a technological solution. So while I may still try to organize my book collection, there's a good chance I'm going to have to do it the old-fashioned way -- by pulling out each book and noting its title, author, etc. Of course, typing it into a spreadsheet couldn't hurt either....