A Night at the Book Repository

Posted on May 26, 2021  | Tags: books, bash, scripting, openlibrary.org

It is a lot of work to write out a catalog when you hoard books like you’ll ever have time to read them all, so I came up with a scheme to get the book details, cover, and author details from scanning the UPC.

Every UPC database I could find had some kind of pay model attached to it, making it difficult to justify putting in the work if I wasn’t going to get to scanning right that minute. Thankfully, the good people at openlibrary.org exist and made a simple to use API with the terms of use that amounts to “do not spam our servers.”

Needed dependencies for the script were:

• bash - for bashing
• wget - for web getting
• jq - for json querying
• sftp - for secure FTP putting
• sshpass - for giving a password to SFTP

the script will wait for barcodes to be scanned (or typed), pull the information from the UPC for the book, then pull the author and book cover if available, deletes the JPG cover if it is shows up as a GIF (not sure what is up there- something openlibrary is doing), and will upload to your SFTP server once you type “quit” instead of entering a UPC.

I’m not particularly fond of JSON, so I put it in a .md file, pipe delimiting for later PHP goodness.

Did you find this useful in any way, or have you come up with your own solution? How would you improve my script? Email me or comment below, I’d like to hear from you!

#!/usr/bin/env bash

## Purpose: to generate an inventory of the books I own.
## Many thanks to openlibrary.org for making this possible.

CACHEDIR=$HOME/.cache/bookinventory
bookdbmd=$HOME/Sync/booksdb.md
authordbmd=$HOME/Sync/authorsdb.md
red=$'\e[1;31m'
green=$'\e[1;32m'
normalcol="$(tput sgr0)"
ftp_dir=
ftp_usr=
export SSHPASS=
ftp_host=

clear
echo -e "Start scanning barcodes to continue.\nType \"quit\" to finish.\n\n"

while :
do
  [ ! -d $CACHEDIR ] && mkdir $CACHEDIR
  [ ! -f $bookdbmd ] && touch $bookdbmd
  [ ! -d $CACHEDIR/cover ] && mkdir $CACHEDIR/cover
  echo -n "$green UPC: $normalcol"
  read -r
  UPC=$REPLY
  if [ "$UPC" -eq "quit" ]; then
    break
  fi
  if [ $(grep $UPC $bookdbmd) ];
  then
    echo book already scanned.
  else
    bookJSON=$(wget -qO - https://openlibrary.org/isbn/$UPC.json)
    title=$(echo $bookJSON |jq -r '.title')
    subjects=$(echo $bookJSON |jq -r '.subjects[0]')
    number_of_pages=$(echo $bookJSON |jq -r '.number_of_pages')
    authors=$(echo $bookJSON |jq -r '.authors[0].key')
    notes=$(echo $bookJSON |jq -r '.notes.value')
    authorID=$(echo $authors |cut -d"/" -f3)
    publishers=$(echo $bookJSON |jq -r '.publishers[0]')
    authorJSON=$(wget -qO - https://openlibrary.org$authors.json)
    author=$(echo $authorJSON |jq -r '.name')
    bio=$(echo $authorJSON |jq -r '.bio.value')
    birth_date=$(echo $authorJSON |jq -r '.birth_date')
    death_date=$(echo $authorJSON |jq -r '.death_date')
    [ ! -f $CACHEDIR/cover/$UPC-L.jpg ] && wget -qO $CACHEDIR/cover/$UPC-L.jpg http://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/$UPC-L.jpg
    if [ $(cat $CACHEDIR/cover/$UPC-L.jpg |head -1 |grep -a GIF89|tr -d '\0') ];
      then
        rm $CACHEDIR/cover/$UPC-L.jpg
    fi
    if [ -z $title ];
    then
      echo "$red Title not available."
    else
      echo "$UPC|$title|$authorID|$publishers|$number_of_pages|$subjects|${notes//[$'\r\n']}" >> $bookdbmd
      if [ ! $(grep $authorID $authordbmd) ];
      then
        echo "$authorID|$author|$birth_date|$death_date|${bio//[$'\r\n']}" >> $authordbmd
      fi
    fi
  fi
done

cp $bookdbmd $CACHEDIR/booksdb_bak.md
cat $CACHEDIR/booksdb_bak.md |sort > $bookdbmd

cd $HOME/Sync

sshpass -e sftp -oBatchMode=no -b - $ftp_usr@$ftp_host << !
   cd $ftp_dir
   put booksdb.md
   put authorsdb.md
   dir
   bye
!

cd $HOME/.cache/bookinventory/cover

sshpass -e sftp -oBatchMode=no -b - $ftp_usr@$ftp_host << !
   cd $ftp_dir/covers
   put *.jpg
   dir
   bye
!

exit $?