This is a SL4A (Scripting Layer for Android) script that I used for cataloguing my personal book library.
It scans a barcode, looks it up with the http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/doc/api.htm api, and stores the information in a text file.
- Move the isbn.py and lookup.py scripts to the SL4A folder on your phone (mine is /sdcard/sl4a/scripts/
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Execute isbn.py
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Print out the exit_code.png image. You scan that to exit the script.
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The results of the catalog are stored in the same folder as isbn.py, and the file is called books.txt
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If the metadata of a book contains non-ascii characters, the script breaks when it tries to write to the catalog (fh.write()). The solution, I think, is to encode everything in unicode. I'm not sure what type of encoding the API is using. The error that is being raised is "UnicodeEncodeError".
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I've had issues with certain books in the past. I don't remember which barcode format it was, but certain older formats are not scanned correctly by my phone's scanner, which causes the API query to fail. Maybe this is a result of my ignorance on barcode types. I left a "convert" function, that currently just returns the barcode that it is passed. It also takes a barcode format argument, which is coming from the phone's barcode scanner. This could be used to make the necessary conversions so that the API query won't fail.
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Occasionally, when trying to scan the exit_code.png barcode, my phone picks up an EAN_8 barcode with some strange number.
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Add a manual input GUI for barcodes that are not found in the worldcat database
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Text to speech verification with the android API's
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Multiple ISBN lookup API's to fall back on if a query is not found on worldcat