Usually it’s my pal Gavin who posts this kind of thing, but hey, why not. Maybe he’ll blog about dead languages tomorrow.
Remember what I said about maybe getting Delicious Library going over the break? Well, it’s going… and going… and going. I’ve got 245 books entered in so far. Only about 6,342,351 to go.
The whole thing is pretty slick, actually. You enter books (or DVDs, or CDs) by title, author, ISBN number, or even by scanning the barcode with an iSight camera, and then it pulls the item’s data off of Amazon.com—cover, genre, publisher, series, retail value, description, etc. (all as available, of course). You can hand-edit anything you need to, you can update cover art by dragging an image onto the item’s entry, you can sort by any category you like, and so on. Other very practical features include easily being able to set up a “checkout” system for loaning out books, integration with Amazon.com Marketplace if you want to get rid of things, and so on. It will also make book recommendations based on what you have (with quick ‘n easy links to the product on Amazon.com, of course).
It’s not perfect by any means; Library of Congress or Dewey data would be nice, as would the ability to generate a bibliography, the genres imported from Amazon are not consistently accurate or useful—and it’s going to take a lot of hand-tweaking to make them useful. Custom fields would be a most appreciated feature. On the other hand, this is a version 1.5 product, and I’m told some of these things will be available in v2.0 (due within a couple of months, apparently). Also, you can easily export your Delicious catalog to LibraryThing, which does do Library of Congress and plenty of other things, enough so that it’s worth it to have both, really.
If you’re a Mac user drowning in books, Delicious Library might very well be worth your time.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 
I was going to ask why you’d use this at all instead of just using LibraryThing, but then I saw the bit about auto-scanning barcodes using iSight–that is pretty cool.
Alrighty, so then, the question is- is it worth $40?
There are so many of these things, now… it’s getting a little much, isn’t it!
I think it’s worth $40, yeah. The scanning thing is way cool. Yes, you can buy the $15 LibraryThing scanner, but I’m not convinced that’s worth it. $65 ($40 for Delicious, $25 for a LibraryThing lifetime membership) to be able to scan barcodes with equipment I already have AND organize by Library of Congress or Dewey is very much worth it, as far as I’m concerned.
if you have a ton of books and want to put ’em all in there, that makes sense. That iSight scanning option rules…
Organize by Dewey! how cute! 🙂
Hey now, no need to get condescending here, Mr. MLS…
you know you own like 10 times as many books as we do anyhow. 😉 We organize ours by “basic discipline” followed by some kind of color-similarity algorithm, heh.
Though, we do have good reason to have gotten rid of most of our books. It was occurring to us that, when we move into the duplex in Dallas, that will be our 8th residence in a little under 10 years of marriage.
aww, man. I forgot that I can’t do fake html or WordPress thinks I’m actually trying to do html. what I meant to add at the beginning of that comment was:
U/silly librarianW
bah… forget it.
Er… forget what?
I have 716 books scanned into Delicious so far, and the process of exporting to Library Thing has been pretty smooth. We’ve got two and a half large shelves organized by LCC so far, and I’d say we’re about halfway done.
What about books that don’t have LCC data for whatever reason? Is there a way one can “cook” their own LCC number?
Richard
Er… forget what?
oh, sorry… I was trying to create a fake XML end tag for “silly librarian” but WP didn’t want to let me do it… so I gave up.
As for LC numbers, I hope you’ll find my comment to your other post useful!
Yep, very useful. Thank you!
Now, how do I make inline asides work on WordPress?
well, when I want it to work on standalone WordPress, I use K2. For WordPress.com, I think there might be a K2 theme. If you don’t want to use that, you might be able to figure out how they make it work using K2 and then do something like that?