Having recently finished up our library/study, my wife and I wanted to organize our growing book library to make it easier to find books and lend them out. Delicious Library to the rescue.
The app is $40 from Delicious Monster and at that is a good value. The trial will let you add up to 25 books before you have to purchase. The app is only available for macs running Leopard.
It uses the iSight camera to read the bar codes on books and a variety of other items (video games, DVDs, tools, etc.). You can also use a wireless bar code scanner, but it's not necessary. Based on our experience, the iSight camera works quite well. You need a steady hand to stabilize the image, but if you had trouble or need to scan a bunch of items, a simple desktop easel setup would do the trick. The app grabs as much information as is available from amazon including cover pics, size, page length, price, etc. The linkup with amazon allows you to rate/review easily and buy/sell through amazon. There are some standard fields you can edit like read, loaned, copies and location. You can manually add items with a lookup feature that quickly retrieves likely matches with cover pics.
Once the items are in the library, you can customize the list view (similar to itunes interface) or browse for items on the virtual shelves it creates. You can also search the library. The app works nicely with itunes and bonjour.
If you're looking for a library cataloging app and have a mac w/ camera and Leopard, this is the way to go.
MediaMan is the same thing, just for Windows PCs (yes the Mac version was first). The problem is that for those of us who have decided to reduce clutter and throw away all of the cases, album covers, dvd jackets, etc. we are left with no bar codes, and I'm not going to manually enter everything I've got.
Posted by: Robert Nystrom | Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 09:24 PM