Barcodes were invented in the early 1950s, although it took another twenty or so years before they started to become more widely adopted. They are essentially a style of font that is pretty impregnable on its own to human vision (although helper information is often included for our eyes) but easy for machines to read quickly and accurately. For example, on most books published in my lifetime, I can expect to find a barcode with the ISBN number on the back cover.

I’m still using LibraryThing to track both the books I own and the much larger number of books I’ve read from other sources like public libraries. That means I have to enter each book as I get my hands on it. I used to just type in the numbers and for a while have been using the LibraryThing app. The problem with the latter is that I don’t think it has seen a lot of development time recently and often seems a bit flaky in use. This weekend, after another library trip along with several new books picked up at the Keswick Convention, I wondered if I could find another way to get the numbers?

It turns out that an app I already had installed on my Android phone, called QR Code Reader and Scanner – QR (a less than snappy title) was up to the job. As well as QR codes (a more recent form of barcode which can carry much more information) it is very snappy at reading in the original ‘linear’ ones. The most efficient route I’ve found is to scan the code, share it to my Google Keep account and then, back on my computer, copy and paste the ISBN codes into LibraryThing. There are options with some programs to read directly from the phone to the computer but, without a bit more security investigation, I’m not quite ready for that. Especially as I increasingly have to squint to read the numbers directly (not to mention the typing accuracy challenge) I think this will do for now.