Well, I finally got around to trying out Delicious Library. In a nutshell, it rocks!
I downloaded the demo and tried that first. I didn’t have an iSight camera, so I had to type in ISBN’s and UPC’s by hand. This wasn’t much fun for the few books I tried, but at least information (title, author, publisher, etc.) was returned. Hand-entry for videos sucked–out of 4 relatively recent DVD’s I tried, not one had any information returned. I tried the ISBN, UPC, and any other human-readable text printed in barcode blocks, but I couldn’t get DL to successfully look up any of these DVD’s. I only had two CD’s in the house, one of which was by a local artist. The lookup for the mainstream CD went smooth, but Mike Comfort’s CD had to be hand-entered.
Typing in UPC’s and ISBN’s and such isn’t something I’m willing to do for all my CD’s, videos, and books, so I went ahead and picked up an iSight to see how that worked with the DL demo. ($150, ouch! But I figured I could try to return it if it didn’t work for DL.) After hooking up the iSight I was able to fill up the DL demo shelf (25-item limit) in just a few minutes. It worked great, so I went ahead and bought a license for the full Delicious Library. After forking out $150 for the iSight, spending $40 on DL was a bargain!
With the iSight, my “lookup success” was:
- 20/20 books
- 50/52 videos
- 3/4 CD’s
Most of our books, videos, and CD’s are in storage while we remodel our house, so I don’t have a huge sample.
This is a great application, when combined with an iSight. I’m looking forward to exploring it further. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’d still like to see support for boardgames added to this package. (I don’t own any video games, but I have over 100 boardgames that I would like to catalog.)
Update 2006-01-10 19:49:07 According to the DL Help, any FireWire digital video camera will work. I’d guess that there are some much cheaper alternatives to the iSight.
I also scanned the rest of our library at work this morning, 145 books total. Of these, 14 had no barcode (or it was covered by a bookstore sticker), so I had to type in the ISBN’s. Only one book with a visible barcode failed lookup, a 10-year-old book on HTML.