WorldCat, RedLaser, Google Books and much more

In my last post, I mentioned a new iPhone called RedLaser. I guess I need to be a little more specific. RedLaser is an app that reads UPC barcodes. If you read a barcode from a product in a store (or elsewhere) it will look up the product and search for a price on the Internet. The app has recently been expanded to read UPC barcodes on books. In addition to looking up the book and a price on the Internet, the program also looks in WorldCat to find a copies of the book in libraries, starting with the library closest to your location. WorldCat is a consolidated catalog of over 10,000 libraries world wide and has over 1 billion books cataloged. RedLaser's ability to find products is a little spotty, but with the interaction with WorldCat, there is almost no book it cannot identify as long as it has a UPC barcode.
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