Let me tell you a bit about my BookVault dream...
Book databases are the bread and butter of Freshman year CS-101 Introduction to Computer Science. It's easy to correlate the logical structure with the real world, and everybody understands the difference between a Bag of Books and a Library. So why would I, with twentycough years of fun and exciting coding projects under my belt, want to build a one of those?
It's all about real estate. I read a lot of science fiction books. And I tend to have a collectors mentality. I want my collection of all the books I've read (those are my books now, I've read them so I own them) so I can peruse them and reminisce and think about the good times we've had together. Keeping that entire collection means I have to have bookshelves and space for my bookshelves. The area in which I live right now, floorspace is an average of ~$400 per square foot.
Instead of rows of bookshelves, I'd like to keep my collection in a database on one of my servers. I'd like to be able to browse my collection, write notes about any given book, search my collection, and so on.
Well, that's all well and good, but there's more. When I'm at Book Buyers and I can't remember whether or not I already own that fun looking book in front of me, I want to be able to scan the ISBN code of the book with my phone and have it check my collection on my server for me. I also want to be able to scan a book and have it tell me which books by that author I have in my collection. Hey, now.
And just to round it out, I want to be able to keep a watch list of books I want to read. There are all kinds of exciting vectors here: I could have it periodically search online for sales of books on my watch list and alert me if something just got cheap. I could have my watch list be by author, where it could look up all the books by that author and automatically add any that aren't already in my list. And so on.
Ah, to dream of books. This is what my BookVault project is all about.
Book databases are the bread and butter of Freshman year CS-101 Introduction to Computer Science. It's easy to correlate the logical structure with the real world, and everybody understands the difference between a Bag of Books and a Library. So why would I, with twenty
It's all about real estate. I read a lot of science fiction books. And I tend to have a collectors mentality. I want my collection of all the books I've read (those are my books now, I've read them so I own them) so I can peruse them and reminisce and think about the good times we've had together. Keeping that entire collection means I have to have bookshelves and space for my bookshelves. The area in which I live right now, floorspace is an average of ~$400 per square foot.
Instead of rows of bookshelves, I'd like to keep my collection in a database on one of my servers. I'd like to be able to browse my collection, write notes about any given book, search my collection, and so on.
Well, that's all well and good, but there's more. When I'm at Book Buyers and I can't remember whether or not I already own that fun looking book in front of me, I want to be able to scan the ISBN code of the book with my phone and have it check my collection on my server for me. I also want to be able to scan a book and have it tell me which books by that author I have in my collection. Hey, now.
And just to round it out, I want to be able to keep a watch list of books I want to read. There are all kinds of exciting vectors here: I could have it periodically search online for sales of books on my watch list and alert me if something just got cheap. I could have my watch list be by author, where it could look up all the books by that author and automatically add any that aren't already in my list. And so on.
Ah, to dream of books. This is what my BookVault project is all about.
