> Different shelves by category: fiction vs non-fiction and their subdivisions. Within the shelves, alphabetise.

I worked on a similar project, with thousands of books to organize. We did just that, because it seemed common sense. We had a couple of issues:

1. We found that sorting books by category took quite a lot of time. For every book we had to spend a couple of seconds deciding in which category it should go. By the time we started wishing we had put them all together, sorted only by alphabet, it was already late.

2. Shelving books alphabetically is a problem when they keep coming and going. How do you know how much space to leave on the shelf for a specific letter? Maybe now you have 10 books by Stephen King, but the next container will have 50 more. If you don't leave enough space you'll have to shift all the books after that letter.

> If you don't leave enough space you'll have to shift all the books after that letter.

This is what card files were originally invented for— number all the shelves, put your new book wherever there’s room, and put a card with the title and shelf number in a sorted drawer. When you get rid of the book, get rid of the card.

That works well for closed stack collections. Open ones, not so much.

At a local LP shop, they had a sign saying "If you misshelve a LP, you might as well steal it, at least someone will listen to it" (approximate translation).

Shelving in instead central to many specialty shops!

Yes, but there is something to be told for wading through mountains of junk to unearth something notable, I think many book nerds connect to that feeling.

One banana box full of random books: sure. Fun to dig into and see what's there.

Twenty unsorted banana boxes: every book just becomes a blur (as in, “Oh great, another Danielle Steele novel, and another bible, and another Excel 97 for dummies, …”).

I’m not the world’s biggest bookworm but I go to Goodwill almost every week and look through the used books for sale. The most fun part is browsing because I never go in knowing what I’m looking for.

That is only fun because they already cataloged them for you. They made a little collection "used books for sale" with just the right size for you to enjoy browsing through. Now imagine you run into a barn full of books, a couple of containers outside, unsorted, all labeled "used books for sale" and no way to tell which were there last week and which weren't. At best you can visit 1% of the books this week, and next week the same 1%, or maybe another. That's what the issue is here.

Most people do not enjoy that more then once or twice.

While I largely agree with your sentiment, I'd like to note that alphabetizing only assists those who know what they are looking for.

In a bookstore, this is a virtue. But we appear to be dealing with a book barn. Perhaps the patrons of book barn have not wandered in by accident while searching for a bookstore :)

For OP: I think you might be better off photographing the ISBN and then using a service or script to do a lookup and associate that with a cover and title. Various editions might not have their covers recorded in a database, and titles will give many dupes, but an ISBN will uniquely identify a book.

Additionally, OCR'ing stylized text is problematic. I wouldn't expect easy reading of covers, particularly of used books.

The challenge is, if the catalogued book is not immediately associated with where to find it if retrieving it later, all is in vain...

You need to stick a barcode on the location (shelf, box, etc) like they do in a warehouse. Scan the book, check it is correct, scan the location to book it in. Doesn't have a barcode, put it in another area for later. I wrote a sketch of exactly this once...

Ish. It would help with inventory anyway, by comparing data at point of scanning and point of sale - “we sold the last Stephen King, sorry”, “we do have a Twilight recorded, so it’s there, but you’ll have to find it...”

I wonder if OP has considered the 'next' step: what to do with the referenced data. If it's just to catalog for ease of search or to help identify potential jewels, keepers, junk and then price appropriately.

The answer to this is important in order to properly size the effort. If the goal is to impove the business efficiency of the store, then it should be seen from ROI stand-point. Even the fellow customers/rummaggers could be engaged with a right incentive and tools. Otherwise, the next estate books container shipment will negate the gains of ordering.

Basically, is OP ready to overhaul the operations or is just willing to do something nice just for now?

Ideally, a book cover and info page should be scanned/photo'ed on first touch either by receiver or shopper and sticker coded somehow as processed, then left wherever. In case any jewel-worthy titles uncovered from OCR, the book could be located (stickerwise, date log, crate, whatever) and brought to prominence and priced as appropriate.

Unleashing imagination, as an incentive and QC strategy - some sort of automated OCR and lookup could locate the pointed book on amz or elsewhere and thus reviews and going price vs rummager's deal.

Either way, I'd see this more of a business question, rather than a technical one. Donating a technical solution is fun, but without changing the operations process is not going to be sustainable.