Does anyone know of a Shortcut flow or an app that would enable me to scan the ISBN code/number of a set of books and send that data to a spreadsheet (Google or Excel)? So at the end, I’d have list of all the books and their details in the spreadsheet?
Looking to donate a moderately sized book collection and want to have a list of all the books in the collection for recipient to provide an estimate of value.
Maybe try this shortcut from this Reddit thread as a first try?
It’s not a Shortcut, but you might try using an app like Reading List. It is capable of scanning the ISBN with the camera and would add the books to its database. When you’re done, you can export your list as a .csv file.
I saw that one and played around with it but the Shortcut did not send the data anywhere. Also, I scanned a few books but the output was spotty and inconsistent.
Oh this could work. I’ll check it out. Thanks!
There is an Obsidian/JavaScript plugin that does a good job. I appreciate that you don’t need/want another tool. However the code would make a good starting point for anything else that spoke JavaScript.
I used Reading List to scan the ISBN codes of the books and it was awesome! Totally did the job.
My only nit was that as I created my own lists to categorize the books, the app added a count of each book to the list name (I.e. if I scanned books and put them in my ‘NYC’ list, the output in the CSV was ‘NYC (n)’ vs just ‘NYC’ so I then couldn’t filter against my list 
). Was going to send them a note to fix this.
Once you export the .csv file, you could use a regular expression to delete the number. For example, you would replace the expression NYC \(\d*\) with NYC.
If you’re not familiar with regular expressions, it’s like find-n-replace on steroids. The \( and \) characters are simply “escaped” parentheses (because parentheses have specific functionality in regular expressions). The \d matches a digit 0-9, and the * specifies that there may be more than one digit.
Many tools support regular expressions. If you load the .csv in BBEdit, you can manage the replacement easily…
The yellow highlight shows that the “pattern” is matched by the expression. When you click on “Replace All”, the numbers go away, and you are left with only NYC.
Save the file as a .csv and open it in Excel or whatever you want to use to view it.
Thanks for the details. I’ll give it a shot!!
