Nothing funny about feldspar

I’m trying to sell some books on Amazon — well, to be honest, I’m trying to sell a lot of books. Some belong to me and Plagioclase, some belong to my mom, some belong to Plagioclase’s mother, and some belong to friends.¹

So I have a lot of books. And having paid my monthly subscription fee, I have the right to upload listings in bulk. Amazon provides a simple spreadsheet with the required columns — I just fill in the ISBN or ASIN, my price, the condition, and a few other simple yes/no type questions, save it as a tab-delimited file, then upload that file to Amazon. Sounds pretty easy, and it is if I want to do say, 10 books at a time.

But I do them a box at a time — a box that’s about 1.5 cubic feet (12″ x 12″ x 18″), which usually holds a lot more than 10 books. Especially paperbacks, of which there are a ton². And each book has to have its condition described, because very few books I’m offering are new³.

This is where I slow waaaay down. Some sellers obviously just cut-and-paste from item to item (”May have a remainder mark. May have slight ding. May have come from a smoker’s house. May have some stray marks. May have…” you get the picture), but I can’t do that. I don’t appreciate buying from that kind of description, and since I want to avoid any possibilities of “Hey! You didn’t tell me that the cover was coffee-stained, so give me my money back!!” I’m very careful about noting possible flaws.

That said, I repeat myself alot. “Remainder mark. Ex-library, with usual markings. Owner’s name inside front cover. Age-toning througout.” There is enough variation from book to book, though that I can’t just cut-and-paste, because invariably I’d forget to edit the one listing that had the coffee-stain on the cover.

Given all this, I spent a few hours today trying to find some software to help me create this simple little tab-delimited file for Amazon. I thought I’d try looking through the various Mac-compatible book database programs, since they obviously can connect to Amazon, and several of them use an iSight to do barcode scanning⁴. I’d want the software to be able to track consignor property, and let me put in my own SKU⁵.

Well, here’s what I found.

• Delicious Library does a nice job with scanning the code and finding the product on Amazon. It even has a “sell your book on Amazon” menu item! However, it will only let you sell one item at a time, and didn’t have any apparent way of doing bulk uploads or of tracking consignors.
• Booxter does a reasonable job with scanning the code, but is more sensitive to the available light. It finds the title with little problem, but I find the interface to be quite hard to use. It might make a tab-delimited list, but I couldn’t figure out how to add consignors without adding several fields to the database. Not that that would be hard, but the detail page is already so cluttered I can’t seem to find anything.
• Bookpedia’s code-scanning is about like Booxter’s (I guess they use the same, or a similar, framework to accomplish it). It’s prettier than Booxter, but again, I couldn’t figure out how to export only the data I wanted. It allows four custom fields, so I would have to “repurpose” some of the others. If I wanted to have a catalog of my (non-sale) book collection, I would look again at this program, because, among other things, it will search the LoC based on title.

I wasn’t happy with any of the book-cataloging programs, so now what? I dunno. I suppose I should just bite the bullet and write my own little app⁶. It’s not complicated, and I probably could do it in a couple of hours in Filemaker, but I’m tired of using Filemaker and its proprietary format when I have MySQL installed, as well as SQLite. I could, with more effort, develop an Excel macro form-filler, but I hate trying to develop Excel interfaces.

So instead of doing anything, I’ll just tell you about it, in hopes that inspiration will strike.

Well, it hasn’t yet…

1. This is not an advertisement, by the way, because I’m not linking to my storefront, and you can’t find it by searching for any of the “-clase” names.↩
2. notwithstanding the cheap light paper used to print them, they pack together really efficiently↩
3. or even “like new” which is a fraught term by itself↩
4. so I don’t have to type in ISBNs for those books that have a barcode — fewer errors↩
5. it includes code telling me where the item is stored — handy when it comes for fulfillment↩
6. ”write” in the sense of “use some other program’s functionality to get what I want” not “create something with programming from scratch”↩