delicious library - a book, dvd and music catalog

Some immediate reactions to Delicious Library, which is a new product for cataloging all the books, music and dvds you possess. It is a nice application with a simple concept. Use the unique identifiers present in UPC or ISBN codes and do a product lookup on amazon.com. I guess that they make money on amazon affiliate income too, through recommending similar books. The application is priced at 40 dollars, which is fair enough, but to make a real use of it you also need an iSight or a bluetooth based barcode reader, typing in 11 and 13 digit strings will get dull quite quickly.

I'd really like a mechanism to sync my amazon wishlist with Delicious Library, the ability to get my wishlist on my iPod would be a real benefit. Related to that I'd like a mechanism to visually flag books I have on loan from others or aspirational items from my wishlist. The wishlist thing was one of my first reactions to the product.

In terms of the application UI, there is no obvious mechanism to stop a net search for information, you get the spinning cursor, but no stop control. Also when the search returns no information there is no clear prompt on what to do next, a failed UPC search gives no indication of why it failed.

I think that this is particularly apparent for CDs, though this is probably a uk product UPC issue. Thus getting support for amazon.co.uk as soon as possible would be fantastic for those of us in the UK.

I think the shelves and collections metaphors will work pretty well, one suggestion they have is to mimic actual shelves in your house, though there is an obvious maintainance issue with this. Genre based or author based smartlists (like iTunes) might be another means for controlling the data. Lucy and I have (guesses) 3-400 CDs and probably over a thousand books, plus 40 odd DVDs.

I think that this usage profile for books is different to the one for music and the same interfaces might not be enough. Music is a much more fluid and easily accessible medium, it is random access and supports repeated enjoyable access. A book is often read once then put on the shelf, but it might be a reference text or recommended to another person. Another competing programme that springs to mind, other than the media libraries, is Endnote, but this is more focused on academic papers rather than whole books.

Lastly, I share my book library and music collection with my wife, we'll both want a copy of delicious library, but with the ability to sync libraries or put the list on two different iPods. A license scheme for a couple would be great, or if the license applied to a single library, but multiple clients. I realise that this is quite a jump in terms of complexity, as data syncing is really hard.

On the whole I like it, but I can see that it will take some time to setup and get in to the swing of it. The benefits of having a record of all of my books and music with me all the time are clear to me. It is a nice realization of the ideas in projects like Aura from Marc Smith and others at Microsoft Research.

It'll take me a few weeks to build up a library and understand how it will affect my behaviour. I'm hoping that it will solve those conversations where I know I have read a book on X and want to recommend it to someone, but the moment passes by the time I get home.