Amazon should give away barcode readers to customers.
The main reason I don't sell my unwanted books or CDs on Amazon (or indeed eBay) is the inconvenience of creating the listings. Amazon partly addressed this a long time ago by making it easier to relist books I'd bought from Amazon originally. But if I could just scan the barcodes of the books from my shelves that I don't want, and have everything else happen automatically, I'd be a much more frequent seller on Amazon. The history of consumer-managed barcode scanning is a little checquered, but this idea in the book world is not new. Here for example is Project Alexandria's implementation:
What I'm gunning for is Amazon specifically to implement it. Make the scanner WiFi enabled, so all I have to do is scan the book, maybe press a button to indicate the condition, and the book is up online and ready for sale. Perhaps that is not so far fetched. LibraryThing allows CueCat scan imports, and who owns 40% of LibraryThing but Abebooks, now of course owned by Amazon.
And yes, you could say just forget scanners, take a photo of the barcode with your mobile. Well, perhaps - I don't think non-iPhone mobiles would make that a very simple process (I don't want to take a photo, log on to a website, check my listing, confirm my address, blah blah). Either way, as long as it's dead simple, I'm not bothered by the hardware used.
Not only would this system make me a much more frequent seller, but it would make a me bigger buyer as well - where else am I going to spend the resulting small amounts of (guilt free) money?
Ahhh, the CueCat. How we miss ya...
I even wrote a CueCat postmortem piece: www.azalea.com/WhitePapers/CueCatPostmortem.pdf
Posted by: Jerry Whiting | August 30, 2008 at 06:37