I imagine that most humanities academics have large collections of books that are in some sense their lives. And if you've ever had to make an insurance claim for something, you'll know that insurance companies want documentation of everything. And, insurance companies get the value of TV sets, but not hundreds or thousands of books. Put these things together, and you have potential nightmare: keeping some sort of catalogue of books that you own. Not guaranteed that would do the trick.
Anyway, with new smartphones with built in cameras, there's a new sort of solution for this cataloging problem: apps that can scan bar codes and download book data from the web.
I tested a few on my iPhone, and Book Crawler seems best: cleanest and most elegant interface, plus you can export the data off your iPhone in CSV or SQLite format. (It seems to me that a key thing to look at in iOS apps is import/export of data, so you don't have your work locked into a proprietary app.)
With this app, I can scan in books really quickly, say 10 in 5 minutes, so you can do a shelf in few minutes when you want to take a break to move around.
On the other hand, committing to this project is yet another form of enslavement to stuff and ownership of things.
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