How well does SnapTell really work?

Much attention has been given to this new app, a kind of visual Shazam which takes a picture of some book you’ve found, sends the snap to its mother ship, and returns some buying advice and multiple links to major reference or book sites that review or sell it.  I dragged some random books off a dusty shelf to see how well it works.

Recent non-fiction books were id’d quickly with the default settings (you can request a slower search that sends a bigger picture file, or vice-versa.)  Likewise a beat-up copy of a recent NYT bestseller, but only after a couple of tries - what worked was making sure to get the entire cover into the photo, not just the verbiage.

Another recent book, with an extremely simple cover (title and author on a field of white with one tiny graphic) would not be recognized until I set the settings to Slow Search.

Two early-70’s books never did get recognized: a very small publisher’s “Springs of Oriental Wisdom” with a distinctive arty cover, and a classic in a [possibly] deprecated genre, Niven & Pournelle’s “The Mote in God’s Eye”.  But an influential non-fiction book from the same year, Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, was promptly found; likewise The [Nixon] White House Transcripts, same vintage & importance.

The oldest book I found,  “The Making of the President 1968″ which is part of Theodore White’s very well-known series, was mis-identified repeatedly, as different unrelated works depending on the search settings: at default Medium over wi-fi, as “From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future”; at Slow over G3, as “The Doctrine of Salvation and Free Agency with Dispensational Truths”!

Lessons:

• get the whole cover in the snap: this is image recognition not character recognition
• use slow enough search: it doesn’t seem to cost much delay at high-speed connects
• best application for this is shopping not research: not everything is there, current is better, you can find your book in the store and immediately see where you should buy it instead [sorry, store!]