On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, k.camplate wrote:
> 1) I was thinking of offering a computer to them in exchange for their
> inventory list oh once a week and a small percentage of sales. I would
> set it up, track all books by publisher, author, genre, when it was
> brought in, (anything else?). Hopefully I could work off of the ISDN
> and bar codes but would print up bar codes for those books without.
> Wouldn't stick the barcodes on the books, would use paper clips. I
> hope there are database programs geared towards this so I wouldn't
> have to do alllll the work.
There are databases geared to work off of ISBN numbers, or inventory part
numbers, or whatever you want in the way of an identifying string. If
they don't already have barcode scanners, I don't know how much they are,
but Border's has them, Book People (which is a nice, big, independent
bookstore in downtown Austin, *extremely* browser-friendly) uses scanners,
but I believe my favorite little independent bookstore just has to have
folks type in the ISBN on every book. I could be wrong on that. (It's
been too long since I've been down there!)
> 5) On the flip side do you think computers+used books = bad idea?
> Would you rather go to bookstores on you own looking for that rare
> gem? Would the bookstore quickly become a hollow picked-over shell
> with dozens of books by Piers Anthony and nothing else? The big thing
> for them is that these places are an exchange, they give you 1/4 a
> price for a book you bring in and sell it for 1/2 price. If the locals
> have nothing to buy it could collapse very fast. But then again these
> places are 3/4 romance novels.
Depending on the store, computers+used books could be a very good idea.
There are specialty bookstores that will help track down particular titles
for you; this has been made a lot easier with the prevalence of the
internet. There are websites that link to databases of lots of used book
dealers, and you can do searches on those to find what you want. My mom
uses them to track down George MacDonald novels (she really wants the ones
that haven't been "adapted" for easier reading by Americans), and my
friend Kimm uses them to track down out-of-print books that she's
interested in.
You might want to find out just what's out there in the way of software &
networking resources, and figure out if you want to help your bookstore
just link in to an existing network.
> 6) Nothing more, this is my favorite number.
There IS no #6!
Julia
