Digital Home Thoughts: Absolutely Delicious... Delicious Library 1.1 Reviewed!

Adding an Item
Delicious Library obtains its information from the massive Amazon.com database. This is good and bad for a number of reasons. Amazon.com stores a plentitude of useful information for each item. For example, for a CD, the Amazon database provides the artist, album, cover art, release date, a track listing, a product description, plus more. This is a massive amount of information that I would normally never have entered into a spreadsheet.

However, because the Amazon.com database is queried, only certain localizations of the Amazon database can be queried. Currently, Amazon.com only provides developers with APIs for its databases from the US, UK, Japan, and Germany. This is a clear problem for most international users. Also, for some types of media, there are plenty of other good databases that Delicious Library could take advantage of. For example, movies could be queried from IMDB, and books could be queried from the US Library of Congress.

It might even be useful if Delicious Library decided to start its own user-contributed database, much like what some Windows organizers do. Of course, this would only be useful if Delicious Monster ensures that the submissions are of high quality, which might be more trouble than it's worth.

You have three options when adding an item. One option is to manually type in the ISBN or UPC number. This works just like you would expect. The second option is to scan the barcodes with an Apple iSight firewire webcam. This is truly an intuitive feature and it works really well. In fact, every single barcode I held up to my trusty iSight was instantly scanned. It's so fast that I scanned about 50 CDs in roughly 10 minutes. Another good thing is that you don't have to wait for the program to finish querying Amazon.com for book information before you scan the next item. Just scan each CD one after the other, and the program will accept the barcodes without a hiccup. This feature alone makes the program worth the $39.95.


Figure 4: Your iSight can be converted to a barcode scanner.

Delicious Library provides a third scanning option for the person who has a massive library that isn't close to a computer. It's a bluetooth laser scanner that wirelessly scans items and sends the information to your Mac. If you take the scanner away from the range of the computer, the scanner will remember up to 500 barcodes. Then, next time you're in range of the computer, Delicious Library will download the barcodes and catalog the items instantly. The cost? $174.95. I wasn't able to test this feature myself since I couldn't obtain a scanner.

All in all, as a US resident, I was incredibly happily with the ease with which I was able to import items. Only a couple of UPC codes weren't found in the Amazon.com database. In this case, you can search by title for your item. This feature worked well, and I was able to import those few missing items.

In addition to the Amazon.com information that's imported, you can add some personal information to each item, including any notes, purchase price, ratings, etc.


Figure 5: Append your own info to each item.

Lately, I've been buying many singles off of the iTunes Music Store, and I'm sure many people are doing the same. It would be nice to be able to import the songs I've purchased from iTunes in addition to the CDs I own.