A look at the upcoming Delicious Library, an iLife-like app for managing your book, DVD, and music collections. Don't miss the screenshots. Coolest feature: add books to your library by scanning the barcode with your iSight camera.
I don't understand the point of managing your book, DVD, and music collections. What is there to manage?
I can understand there are corner cases to media management. Like the person who has 10,000 books and needs to know in which storage system compartment a certain book is located. Like the person with hundreds of DVDs who loans them out to tens of friends and needs to track renters and due dates.
But these kinds of needs seem to come from a limited number of people. Am I wrong? What do you use media management for in real life?
I also don't see a parallel to digital media management. Usually, digital media needs to be managed on the computer because it is kept digitally (iPhoto, iTunes, etc). I don't flip through my CD books to play an MP3 on my laptop. So why would I flip through my Delicious Library to pick up a book from the shelf?
It does look cool though. Except for the fake wood.
If publishers ever open up to digital books as free "teasers" for the dead-tree verisons, this would be great. I have no need for digital books I haven't read, but digital copies of those I have would allow me to annotate, link to, and search them. An interface like Delicious Library would be a great way to do so.
"I don't understand the point of managing your book, DVD, and music collections. What is there to manage? "
Dave, Dave, Dave... When you belong to the McCult, you don't ask silly questions like that. You might get demoted to a level 3 and then you're not allowed to look at Steve directly.
Ask yourself this. Does it look cool?
I'd love to have an inventory of these physical things. It would make it easier to sell them on Amazon or eBay/half.com.
"I don't understand the point of managing your book, DVD, and music collections. What is there to manage? "
Every so often someone will return a DVD to me they borrowed that I had forgotten I even owned. Right this minute there are DVDs I know I own, but can't for the life of my remember who I lent to. I don't know if fancy software like this is overkill or not, but there are things to be managed in my DVD, Music and Book collection.
What's funny is you could write this for Windows, but it's not surprising that no one has. It just seems like a Mac kind of idea.
DeepProse software offers a very similar program called Booxter. It probably not as powerful and is designed only for books, but it also has the iSight bar code reading feature and the auto-fill ISBN feature.
I downloaded it last weekend for $15 to catalog my collection of 1200+ books. The reason you catalog things like that is so you can put it on your PDA, take it to the bookstore, and know whether or not you already own certain books you're eyeing in the used section. I do it all the time.
Unfortunately, the iSight bar code reader isn't as neat as it sounds. While I could get it to work fairly easily, the camera usually had to focus and it was faster just to type in the ISBN number.
The real question is, when are they going to iNtegrate iLife with P2P social networking services like MediaChest?
(Speaking of MediaChest, I find it eminently interesting that a similar service named together in last month's Wired magazine, SongBuddy, is apparently having some database issues. Man, what a way to blow some free publicity.)
For people with media collections I think this application will be a godsend. Just think of all the people (PC users included) who do this sort of thing using FileMaker. There is a need for a database for your DVD, CD, and book collections. For one, it's nice to see what you have. Frankly I am sometimes daunted when I look at my DVD and often turn on the television rather than search through the movies for something decent to watch. For another, what if you could share your collection with other people? Frankly it isn't feasibile to go to Amazon and add, one by one, each piece in your collection (and who would look through it besides?). Now imagine if you could share your collection with friends and family, have it tied into the Amazon api, so a person can easily see what you already own and quite possibly find something you missed by cross-referencing it with Amazon's "You might also be interested in..."
Does anyone know of an application that can catalogue my books, 8-tracks, and VCR tapes?. Please note that it needs to run on a stock VIC-20.
LibDB people. Its coming along.
It ain't as pretty, but it'll do a hell of a lot more.
Is it just me, or does ThinkSecret usually just focus on major companies and Apple-created products?
This feels to me like thinly-veiled advertising.
It could also be used for insurance purposes.... an inventory of your possesions incase of robbery
There is a pedia collection that has been great. (Bruji.com) I now know who has all my stuff and when they should return it. Also the book one makes it easy to sell my books on Amazon and keep track of addresses and buyers. And they do make this software for window, before there was DVDpedia I used DVDprofiler on VirtualPC.
So, WHEN will Delicious Library be released??
I know (with my limited collection) I don't really NEED it, but the eye candy is hard to resist.
Gimme gimme gimme...
I have hundreds (more ? ) books (yes, I read a lot , a lot of kind of books, no I don't speak about comics only , thanks )
and this kind of software will be very useful to remind what volumes of series I have, who I lend a book and so on
why books ? because reading is a PLEASURE (better than TV ) , because there are also book on animals, countries, arts, encyclopedia, because there also french, japan, american and others comics (not simply superheros comics in "mint condition" but real nice books) , and I forgot novels, tons of novels, too many novels to read :)
of course, I have the same need with DVD and CD.
no, I'm not a bookseller. just a normal people with taste in readings
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
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Steven Rubin37 24 2004 7:37PM
Its things like this that make me, a Mac hater for life, want to own a Mac.