When Jeff Bezos decided to improve on Sony's e-reader technology, I'm sure he had something like BitLit in mind. Hell, I bet just about everyone who reads e-books has wished for an app like BitLit. The premise is ridiculously simple: the app urges you to take a so-called "shelfie," which is to say you take a picture of your bookshelf. Then, the app identifies all the books on your shelf from the photograph. In theory, the next thing that's supposed to happen is BitLit would then link you to links for free downloads of e-book editions of the books on your shelf, or it would at the very least link to the cheapest available e-book edition for sale.
BitLit is available in beta version as an iOS app or on Android. I just downloaded the app and tried it out on my Nexus 4. The process of uploading photos to BitLit couldn't be any easier; the app talks you through the whole process. (Unfortunately, the app forces your phone to use the flash when it snaps the photos, and the glares on the spines in the photo might interfere with the identification process.) I captured two shelves' worth of books and then was told to wait 15 minutes for BitLit to process the images.
The good news is, BitLit did a fairly good job of identifying books on my shelf. Here's a screenshot of my phone:
- pbc
- No, my shelves aren't alphabetized. The shame, the shame.
As you can see, most of the books are identified perfectly. But not all of them. The copy of Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks's 2008 James Bond novel, is misidentified as Summer of Faulkner; As I Lay Dying.... Other books on the shelf are equally mislabeled: Ethan Canin's America America is read as Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and that same edition of Gravity's Rainow is also recognized as a book titled Luuurve Is a Many Trousered Thing, by Louise Rennison. But of the two shelves, only two books were identified as e-book editions available through the app: I could buy an e-book edition of James Kelman's Mo Said She Was Quirky for $1.99, and I could buy an e-book of Web 2.0 Solutions, which is a book that is not on my shelves, for $4.99. Out of dozens of books, only two were successfully linked. The rest of the identified books I could put on a "wishlist," supposedly for a day when e-book editions will be available for sale through the app.
Supposedly, once BitLit finds your free books and offers them to you, you are supposed to "take a photo of the cover of your book [to prove you own it] and sign your name on the copyright page in ALL CAPS," at which point the e-books will be e-mailed to you. I can't verify if this process is as easy as they make it out to be, because none of my books were recognized—even the titles that are in the public domain and available for free online, like the Mary Elizbeth Braddon novel.
But this is a beta version of an all-new app, and I'm sure BitLit will improve as it matures. (Or, and this is the more likely course, until BitLit gets bought by Amazon and is eventually incorporated into the Kindle ecosystem.) Part of the reason why e-book adoption hasn't matched the astronomical mp3 adoption rate is that there's no way to "rip" the books you already own into e-book format, the way CDs could magically become mp3s in a matter of seconds. One day someone is going to make an app that allows you to digitize your shelves with a modicum of effort. On that day, e-books are sure to experience another surge of growth.
