James Tauber's Blog 2004/11/09
Delicious Library
Not quite so highly anticipated as Halo 2, but there's been a fair amount of hype around the release of the book/CD/DVD cataloging software for OS X, Delicious Library from Delicious Monster. Yesterday, I downloaded a copy.
It certainly looks cool, presenting your library on a graphic of shelves using cover photos downloaded from Amazon.com. Bar codes can be scanned using an iSight, but I already had a bar code scanner so can use that. I had a number of text files with an ISBN-per-line of all my existing books and I was able to import that file and Delicious Library went off and downloaded all the catalog information (including front cover photo) from Amazon. It even makes use of Amazon to list similar items when you select a book.
I had already put together a catalog of my own using Mark Pilgrim's PyAmazon library but Delicious Library just looks nicer than anything I could have built. The only issues I've found so far:
- it's a little sluggish with my 1200+ books
- it would be nice if there was a feature for identifying duplicates for easy removal
- deleting a book causes the UI to go back to the start of the shelves (was very annoying during my manual duplicate removal)
But all-in-all, it's worth checking out if you run OS X, even if just to see how cool it looks showing you the covers of all your books.
by James Tauber : Created on Nov. 9, 2004 : Last modified Feb. 8, 2005 : (permalink)