But, yep this is a great idea. And you could probably do it from a video walking down those aisles - and present it via a VR or AR technique.
However, you’d probably need more than spines. One of the things about being in a store, is the ability to pull the book out, and look into it; maybe even ask questions of the staff.
Google has a patent on doing just that: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150371085A1/en
My email is [email protected]
(On another note, I have felt for awhile Patents, and Trademarks, should be tied to income, and number of patents applied for. A poor person, like myself, pays just as much as Google for a patent. Crazy? I would like to see patent fees on a graduated scale. Companies that spit out patents daily would be charged much more for every patent. For instance, Google's first patent would be $1000. After 10 the price is 1 million per patent. After 20 the price per patent is 100 million.)
I think it would be a lot of work for book store owners however because along with taking pictures they would also need to fill in some metadata as well about the book to make any kind of searching/categorizing possible. Maybe an intrepid entrepreneur could start with a few bookstores and do that categorization for them as a "do things that don't scale" experiment.
I like old books.
Right now my interest is on Watchmaking, Electronics, and Machining.
The books I like are are usually old, and only found while browsing used bookstores in person. Books with no isbn's. Books that are rare. Books I didn't knew existed. Manuals I didn't know about.
My idea is having the owners of used book stores take pictures of the books they have on shelves(Just the spines. They would need to walk down the isles, and take clear pictures of each wall of books. They would send the pictures to me, and I would somehow stitch the pics into an app.
I have taken pictures of my books on my shelfs, and even with an old iphone, I can zoom into read titles on books.
The end result would be a website where the customer could digitally walk down book store isles (navigation like google maps?) , and order books they might fancy. Think of the way we look at digital paintings in museums?
The owner would get 95% of each sale, or more? Or, all of the money, if the entity was set up as a 501c3 to benefit used book stores.
Imagine all those old books out there, and walking down an isle on books in Ohio, or Ireland, and ordering a book you see on the shelf?
On a certain level, I hope an app like this is never built by anyone. The internet has ruined so many things I liked. Finding an obscure book, at a reasonable price, in a musty book store is an experience I enjoy.
(I'm suprised Google hasen't attempted it already. They could probally do it very well in a virtual reality setting? Oh yea, I like the app this guy did.)