Date: 11 Jan 2009 08:55 am (UTC)
The cost of processing a book/title in a library system can easily double or triple the cost of the book/title to the system. ... What bookseller can afford this?

On second thought, I'm not even sure I get what you mean. I had figured you meant the person-hours to enter the book adds overhead to each book.. but maybe I'm misreading?

When we opened, the only process was, well, the long way. Open box, check packing slip, find book. Check it off, hand over to person who reads off title, author, ISBN, price to person typing it in, and then price tag is printed on sheet, another person finds tag and matches it to book, sticks it on, hands it off to person who carries a stack over to the person shelving... YES we did that for 3,000 books when we first opened. Took six of us about four days. OMG I dreamed in ISBNs for MONTHS.

But these days? If I can get a scanning pen for $200 (or rent one) and scan a book, the ISBN goes into the system and the application brings up list price, author, title, publisher, all that jazz -- a variation on what iTunes does every time I copy a CD over to my computer. It finds the rest and fills in the blanks from a main database.

Way I see it, the building blocks -- the ISBN -- haven't changed. One way or another, if a customer presented a name or store-code that's tied to the ISBN, the system could pull up the file just like doing a search. Here it is, burn it onto a CD or a sim-card that goes into the Moby or eReader or Kindle, and there you go. ISBN-tied to everything.

Unless, of course, you meant something entirely different and I'm just clueless this late at night. It's possible! Matter of fact, it's highly likely!
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