![]() This is all very useful for those of us with brick and mortar stores, but what about Internet-only booksellers? The advent of ISBN look-up through such programs as Homebase and Readerware means that populating the fields of a book record can be very quickly accomplished. This data gets downloaded into a computer and updates the BIN field in our inventory. As we shelve books, we scan the price label and scan the barcode on the shelf. (They also now make complete Palm OS PDAs with scanners built in.) So now our PDA is equipped with a scanner and database software by Tracer (a deal at $17.95). And Symbol makes a barcode scanner to fit this slot. (Yes, I’m a bit of a gadget nut.) The Handspring PDAs have a slot in the back into which one can insert various add-ons. I had a retired Handspring Visor PDA lying around: it became redundant when my new cell phone included a Palm PDA in it. For this, we acquired our third generation of scanners. We need to track books as they get shelved or are moved around the store. Having accomplished this feat, the data obviously needs to be maintained. So, before taking inventory again, every shelf got a barcode label identifying it. Is that biography of Elizabeth the First in the Biography section or in English History? Anthology has a “BIN” field for the physical location of the book but we had never used it. When we started selling books on-line, I quickly realized that the really time-consuming part of filling Internet orders was just finding the books. We scanned them into a big long dBase file, which was used to update the on-hand field in the Anthology database. We set up a computer at a central table and hired a bunch of strong young people to bring the books to the table a shelf at a time. The first inventory we took after getting all of our books bar coded went very quickly. You can recognize them since they all start with the numbers “978.” Almost all modern barcode scanners can decode these codes and return the ISBN, but sometimes it’s a feature you have to turn on when configuring the scanner.Īs helpful as barcode scanning is at the cash register, it really helps when doing inventory. These are found on the back covers of trade books and on the inside front cover of mass market paperbacks. For booksellers, the relevant one is Bookland EAN. But there are various coding schemes for the barcodes found on manufactured products. You can find more information about the updated Readerware line at the Readerware Corporation Web site.The labels produced by my software contain just the characters to represent the stock number of that book there are no extra characters or codes. This release continues to improve Mac OS X integration with full support for entering accented characters, improved file selection and support for Mac OS X user based application limits. ![]()
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