Re:Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mounta...
by libguy on Sunday May 05, 2019 @01:44PM
(#19833941)
likely the dataset never became publicly available
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/9/15235686/kobo-acquired-she...
Re:Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mounta...
by walterbell on Sunday May 05, 2019 @11:43PM
(#19836688)
After installing the kobo app, there's no sign of the Shelfie technology.
Re:Ask HN: How can I automatically scan and catalog a mounta...
by walterbell on Sunday May 05, 2019 @11:19AM
(#19833220)
This dataset would be useful if it can be extended. Do you recall how they seeded the collection of spine images?
A number of years ago a west coast startup spent quite a lot of time on a product that could identify books by their spine image which I think is what you want here; finding isbns and barcode scanning them is totally impractical at this scale.
A few months before they closed up shop, I introduced them to Brewster kahle at the internet archive and convinced them to leave a copy of their database with the internet archive.
I have no idea what happened after that, but I believe they did send the data over. Machine learning is vastly different today than when they launched, and even back then they had enough data that they could get 10/12 of my books in a single photo; I really encourage you to get in touch with the archive.
The company was called bitlit then Shelfie.
As a side note I got interested because I thought it would be great to get a spine image as an api for rendering my ebooks as a library in vr/ar - I still think this would be cool.