The BookThinker Newsletter ISSN 1547-9501 #148 13 September 2010

#148 Update, 27 September 2010

Update Announcements

Scanning Solutions for Booksellers Part I: Using Your iPhone (or Droid) for Real-Time ScoutPal Scanning Recently, I've recommended an application for iPhone users called pic2shop, which "scans" bar codes via your phone's camera and returns data from an array of different venues. Bar code recognition is near instantaneous, and results come up more or less quickly at a speed that depends, to a large extent, on your local connection. If you have an iPhone 4 (with its now significantly faster processor) and are in a Wi-Fi hot spot, performance at least approaches what can be obtained with a dedicated PDA/socket-scanner unit accessing uploaded data. And 3G is not far behind.... However, However, pic2shop's developer, Vision Smarts, has recently launched a user-configurable pro version of pic2shop (currently priced at $9.99) that enables us to access data from the data source of our choosing - including ScoutPal, which delivers much more detailed, real-time results in one step

Scanning Solutions for Booksellers Part II: Product Review for the Opticon Bluetooth Scanner In my eyes, the tiny OPN 2002 programmable barcode reader is an example of Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Once paired via Bluetooth to an iPhone or iPad, it will instantly scan and read a barcode into any program or web browser. The high quality laser works well even in difficult bright light conditions.

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BookThink's Top 10 on eBay August 2010 In August 2010, Stephen King dominated the Fiction Top 10 with an ARC of Night Shift coming in at #1. Another writer who placed more than once was Robert E. Howard whose Arkham House science fiction publications The Rarest Solomon Kane Wandering Star and Skull Facecame in at #4 and #5. Napoleon (Taschen) topped the non-fiction list with both recent and titles over a century old filling in the rest. A 1878 Chess Strategy, by Sam Loyd, a pair of 1880s Alice in Wonderland and an 1880s Dr. Thorne, by Trollope were among the older titles on the non-fiction list. If you are scratching you head at a Trollope novel listed as Books > Nonfiction, you are not alone. In the Antiquarian and Collectible category, a 1655 Don Quijote de la Mancha lead the pack at $20,000, followed by a book of hours, a 1475 Cicero title, a Vince Lombardi 1st edition, and a Shakespeare second folio of Romeo and Juliet.

 
#148 Special Report 2, 6 September 2010

From the Editor

A Midwestern Book Journey Part I: An Interview with Bonnie Blodgett For two weeks in late June and early July, Ron and I set off on our annual book scouting trip, this time across the upper Midwest. Read a summary of the trip or a day-by-day account of our experiences at our book shop blog (entries 6/27/10 through 7/18/10). In addition to visiting 18 bookshops, numerous antique malls and several libraries, and squeezing in a pleasant 5-day visit with my family in Minnesota, we met with three authors while we were in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. About a week into our travels we crossed from Wisconsin into Minnesota at Stillwater, Minnesota, a lovely historic town on the banks of the Mississippi River, close to the metro area of the Twin Cities. After we were settled in the cool old Water Street Inn, we telephoned William Souder, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author who lives in the Stillwater area and whom I interviewed for BookThink in March of this year (Part 1 and Part II) to discuss his book, Under a Wild Sky. He invited us to lunch at The Dock, a restaurant overlooking the river just a few blocks from where we were staying. We were lucky to catch up with him, as later this summer he is off to Southport Island, Maine, to stay at the property where Rachel Carson once lived and where he will be doing research for his upcoming biography on that iconic ecologist. Much to my delight, he brought with him a second talented author from the area, Bonnie Blodgett.