Tasty Reviews for Delicious Library

I was skeptical at first, but I need to get organized - I’m moving soon.  The biggest task is tackling my immense personal media library, from books to games to music.  I’d heard some good stuff, and I was ready to pull my hair out, so I finally heeded the advice I’d gotten from some of my colleagues and checked out Delicious Monster to read about their award winning program, Delicious Library.

Get your Mac, a webcam, and Delicious Library and rediscover your home library. 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.

This claim of user-friendliness and siren’s call of a more organized life were enough to draw me to Delicious Library, a one-stop media cataloguing program for Mac OS X.

I am anal about organization. However, being the flaky artist that I am, I get a little too distracted and the mess just piles up and then I get too frustrated to organize, and then become frustrated with the lack of organization, and it becomes a vicious circle. However, with the help of Delicious Libary, I may become one. Strong words? Maybe. But I’ve never had so much fun and been so productive at the same time. This brilliant, seamless piece of software may well turn my organizational life around – and that’s no small feat.

Can I get a Hell Yeah?

My book collection alone is enormous. I have no less than three shelves of Japanese textbooks and supplimental study materials related to Japanese language study. Then, another couple shelves full of novels, manga, and Japanese culture books, and then a few more shelves of various textbooks, manuals, and other vaguely “educational” materials. That’s a whole bookshelf, packed full, and I’m not even out of my “reference” section. The rest of my “reference” is various tech and science books, many outdated, manuals and guidebooks for games, programs, operating systems, “teach yourself to program” books for about four different programming languages, and a couple random miscellaneous books. I won’t even begin to tackle the myriad fiction and nonfiction books I’ve amassed, but will simply say that Ian has more.

I needed a way to organize them, see what I have, and see what I can get rid of. I was going to do this by hand, and because of the enormity of this task, I never get around to it. That’s where Delicious Library comes in. I’d heard some good reviews, and decided I’d take the plunge and get a copy. Good lord, so far this is the answer to my organizational prayers.

Ingenius, Painless Data Entry is Almost… Fun?

The hands down best feature in Library is the fact that you can use your iSight as a barcode scanner to make cataloging a breeze. Very few of my books, games, and CDs don’t show up – and they’re generally foreign language books or very rare ones. Otherwise, it’s like scanning something at the supermarket – point, beep, and you’re done. Easy as that. Library cross-references with Amazon and pulls information, and even cover art, and files it in the correct category for you. To give you an idea of how easy this is, I spent under 45 minutes, and was able to get 40 books, 15 video games, and 20 movies. Bing!

At only 40 bucks, this software is a steal – if you can’t fork over the cash, they have a trial version for download, too. It is a “Must Have,” for certain. Even someone as scatterbrained as I am can catalogue their library with this amazing bit of software genius.

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