There's got to be a way to do this...

Here's what I want to be able to do.

We've got a ton of books in the Fog Creek library, in no particular order, and it's gotten to the point where it's actually easier to order a new copy of a book from Amazon than to find a book we already have!

What I'm looking for is software that will let me scan in the barcodes on all these books, you know, with the ISBN numbers, and then it will look them up online somewhere and download card catalog information and the Library of Congress number, and add this information to a database, and print out a little sticker on the spot with a card catalog number that I can put on the spine so that the books can be shelved like in a real library, and found again easily.

Do you know of anything that can do this?

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

Enter your email address to receive a (very occasional) email whenever I write a major new article. You can unsubscribe at any time, of course.