For now, one of my favorite party trick apps is the barcode scanner. Hold the phone over a barcode and in a few seconds you get a picture of the product, user reviews, best online prices with links to buy, and local stores with directions on how to get there. It works less well with random items (it told me my US Weekly was a pair of Ralph Lauren boxer shorts, and that my Aquafina was Fuse water), but with books it’s a thing of beauty. Which made me wonder why Google didn’t bother optimizing Google Books for Android…

Teleread responded that it’s “time for Google to be thinking about a reflowable format like ePub,” and that FBReader is already gearing up for the GPhone.

Now Google’s Booksearch blog is noting that Barcode Scanner (one of the three main scanner apps – I downloaded ShopSavvy) allows you to instantly search the contents of books through Google Book Search as soon as you scan it.

For students, this could be an easy way to locate that critical passage that the professor was talking about in lecture. Or if you’re browsing through the shelves of a bookstore, you could use this application to easily determine whether a book contains the information you’re looking for.

So far I’ve mainly been using ShopSavvy to save my bookstore browsings to a wishlist (rather than writing the titles up the inside of my arm), but I’m interested to try this. However, with it I fear that my last real world search capabilities will finally die out.  Oh well.

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