Yesterday’s mews: the CueCat was the first device to link books and the internet.Back in 2007 the hot thing in connecting your books to the internet was a handheld device in the shape of a cat. The CueCat barcode scanner was a relic of the first dotcom bubble: a device for scanning barcodes in newspapers and linking them to websites. When the original manufacturer went bust, the online reading community LibraryThing bought a job lot and sold them cheap to its members, allowing them to scan the back of their books and add them to their LibraryThing accounts. I once spent a happy weekend scanning and uploading more than 750 books: a laborious and, in hindsight, somewhat pointless process. I don't appear to have updated my LibraryThing account since 2009.
This isn't digitisation. Putting my paper books on a digital bookshelf didn't allow me to read them elsewhere, search inside them, share bookmarks or any of the more useful actions possible with ebooks.
Nevertheless, the urge to connect paper books to the digital sphere remains a strong one. We're still not at the stage where we can "rip" our own books at home, as most of us have done at some point with our CD collections, transforming them into weightless digital MP3 files and dragging the now pointless shards of plastic to the nearest charity shop. But last week Amazon announced a service to reduce the gap a little bit more.
Matchbook is a new service launching next month which allows Kindle owners to purchase cheap ebook editions of any paper book they've previously ordered from Amazon – ever. Amazon's records, of course, go back to its launch in 1995, and they remember everything you've bought. Like Apple's iTunes Match service, it's another step towards replicating all of our physical, cultural media in the cloud – Amazon's cloud, of course, but no less tempting for it.
