Get a barcode scanner, scan the ISBN and use that to do a API query on Amazon to retrieve title, author, category, price, etc. Store this info in a DB.
Some scenarios:
1. Generally lookup should return something. Store these book by categories, e.g. business, children, fiction, etc. in their shelves/containers for physical browsing by your customers. The more subcategories you can do the better.
2. If price is bigger than some threshold then store these books privately and list for sale directly in an online marketplace. There’s an industry around book scalping (forgot the actual term) where traders buy books from fairs and sell online based solely on margin.
3. The lookup returns nothing - these books are probably very valuable or worthless. Some manual action required.
I was actually considering doing something like this for remainders before, but never got it going. I’d love to know more about your eventual solution.
Last fall, Amazon shut down access to (one of?) their ISBN lookup service, unless you sold enough things from their advertising.
I've been using Tellico (http://tellico-project.org/) and a barcode scanner for many years and it works well. That's just for about 3,000-4,000 books, though. One of the other lookup options works. (ISBNSearch.org?)
Some scenarios:
1. Generally lookup should return something. Store these book by categories, e.g. business, children, fiction, etc. in their shelves/containers for physical browsing by your customers. The more subcategories you can do the better.
2. If price is bigger than some threshold then store these books privately and list for sale directly in an online marketplace. There’s an industry around book scalping (forgot the actual term) where traders buy books from fairs and sell online based solely on margin.
3. The lookup returns nothing - these books are probably very valuable or worthless. Some manual action required.
I was actually considering doing something like this for remainders before, but never got it going. I’d love to know more about your eventual solution.