Dealextreme.com, a company from Hong Kong, offers all kinds of inexpensive goodies. Customers can pay with PayPal, and shipping is free. Interested in a laser pointer for less than two dollars or a SATA/IDE adapter for just eight dollars? If you don't mind waiting up to two weeks for delivery, you're guaranteed to find a bargain with Dealextreme.

For quite a while I had my eye on the CCD-based barcode scanner for US$ 42 dollars (see Figure 1) (one of Dealextreme's most expensive products [2]) before I finally pressed the Buy button.

Mail from Hong Kong

When the mailman finally delivered the package, I could hardly wait to get started. The obvious choice was to write an application to scan the barcodes in my extensive collection of technical literature and store the results in a database. Depending on where the book comes from, the barcodes are either printed in UPC (Universal Product Number) or EAN (European Article Number) format, and Amazon.com offers a free web service that gives you detailed product information if you submit either barcode. This means that a Perl script can easily identify the author and title of a book or the artist for a CD that you scan. The data returned by the service includes CD and book cover images. Adding a graphical user interface to the application lets me display the book cover or CD case onscreen and in color after scanning.

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