Over at present simple, badaunt writes about Delicious Library:
I discovered that Delicious Library is a way to catalogue your books. Just point any FireWire digital video camera, like an Apple iSight®, at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item’s cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.
So of course I downloaded it, plugged in my iSight, and started playing.
Basically it works. Wave the bar code on the book at the iSight, getting the angle and lighting right, and the lookup takes a couple of seconds. Great. However, like badaunt, I can’t imagine actually scanning my whole collection. It would take forever, it would require a fair amount of manual intervention (see below), and when I’m done, what use is it?
But I’d love to be able to use it as an adjunct to blogging. For example, I’ve recently been on a Jack McDevitt kick: I picked up Chindi at an airport bookstore, enjoyed it, followed with Omega, and over the next few weeks I worked my way through another four or five of his books.
Now, it would be brilliant if I could have prepared that last paragraph by scanning a few McDevitt books into Delicious Library and clicking a button to generate a chunk of HTML with thumbnail covers, links to Amazon.com, and so forth. (XMLRPC upload to the blog would be nice, but cut-and-paste is adequate.) However right now Delicious Library offers no easy way to work with the data in the library. The Export... option just dumps out a ton of stuff from the Amazon.com page in plain text; Print... just lists thumbnails and titles in a PDF, and Mail... generates an email message per book with the cover and a link.
What I’d like is the ability to define a template, using predefined variables for the various fields of the item record (title, author, publication date, publisher, Amazon cover thumbnail URL, etc.) Then on command the app could simply expand a copy of the template for each selected item in the library, replacing the variables as appropriate, and dump the whole lot onto the clipboard, ready for me to paste into my WordPress composition window.
I mentioned manual intervention earlier, and I have to say that the bar code scan approach is by no means foolproof. For example, I just tried to scan Jack McDevitt’s Infinity Beach. The application read the UPC – 099455007993 – and mapped it into The Lone Ranger Vol. 2 DVD. Eventually I discovered that the way to correct this was to update the “Details” field labelled amazon® # with the ISBN – 0061020052 – and then instruct the app to Reload details from Amazon.com.... In the first dozen books I tested, I ran into this twice, which is somewhat depressing. Oh, well.
The price is OK ($40; the demo version allows up to 25 items), but Delicious Library needs to be a little more open and extensible to meet my needs. Maybe it could be AppleScriptable…?
UPDATE: Mike, the Major Domo at Delicious Monster Software, assures me that they’re working on the features that I suggested. He also provided a workaround for the scan error (look inside the front cover…). I’m impressed, and I’ve volunteered to be a beta tester.