Delicious Library

Down­loaded and did a quick test of Deli­cious Library, the much talked-about iPhoto style book/dvd/game/music library software.

First impres­sion: Sweet! Using my iSight I tried to scan the near­est book I had lying around. I pointed it at the bar­code on the back of Defen­sive Design for the Web — voila: A robotic female voice spoke the name of the title I had just scanned and the cover appeared on the dig­i­tal shelf.

I got a lit­tle pile of books and went over their backs with the iSight. You get a lit­tle pre­view win­dow with red scan­ner lines across to help your aim, but actu­ally it’s quite easy. I had the best expe­ri­ence with an angle about 30 degrees at a dis­tance of approx­i­mately two inches. It works the way you expect it to work; it beeps, the robot lady con­firms your entry (which is a bit silly but sort of helps you in keep­ing the books flow­ing as you don’t have to pay too much atten­tion to the screen) and the cover appears if it’s in the data­base. I haven’t checked where they look it all up, but out of the ten books I scanned, three of them came up with no cover. Which still beats the hell out of hav­ing to scan cov­ers and enter the titles by hand.

I did have some trou­ble with a few titles; as far as I can tell because of non-standard bar­codes — some of them small, some of them placed funny. I’ll do some more test­ing soon. Now we just need some data­base of Dan­ish poetry and I’m good to go…

But: Pretty nifty if you ask me — at least it a cool way to use your iSight when you haven’t got any friends you’re not iChatting.

An extra ten min­utes of quick play­ing: Scan­ning books con­tinue to be as easy as scrathing your… Euro­pean DVDs, how­ever, seem to be a bit of a prob­lem. Amazon.co.uk sup­port as an option, please. John Sir­a­cusa over at ArsTech­nica has a thor­ough review with some good points, a wish list — and a lit­tle story about the Apple devel­op­ing com­mu­nity.