when I was inventorying my books, my goal was five seconds to scan a book, including dealing with the exceptions.
Laser barcode scanners are in a different league from the barcode scanners on smartphones that decode a photo. the bottleneck is how fast you can position the book.
(of course, in his case, he's got to wait for his thing to go look up the price, which may take considerably more time.)
I was wondering about that while reading the article... Does he really have a complete Amazon book price database on his PDA? If so, how does he keep it up-to-date? I imagine Amazon would object to someone constantly scraping their prices.
the amazon XML api is really nice - it was my primary tool when I was working in that space north of five years ago.
I don't know what this guy did, but what I did (and this would become more useful if I had more clients than just me) was that I cached the data for a certain period of time... so the first time I asked for it within a certain time period it'd actually ask, the second or third time it'd hit a cache.
Now, if I was making software for other people to do this, and I had a bunch of guys like this one using my software to search for books, assuming it went through my db before amazon's, you'd build up a pretty large cache.
Of course, if you could somehow arrange for the whole damn thing to be available offline, that'd be even better, but I don't know how amazon would feel about it. When I was doing it, there were rate-limiting things preventing me; but if you are bigger, there's really no reason for amazon to not give you the data if you are willing to pay for it or what have you; this product is ultimately helpful to amazon.com as a merchant.
Laser barcode scanners are in a different league from the barcode scanners on smartphones that decode a photo. the bottleneck is how fast you can position the book.
(of course, in his case, he's got to wait for his thing to go look up the price, which may take considerably more time.)