Rich Burridge's Blog : Weblog

« Previous day (Oct 1, 2006) | Main | Next day (Oct 3, 2006) »

Monday October 02, 2006

Comments on Book Cataloging With Delicious Library

I've now finished cataloging all my books, apart from the 8-9 boxes of computer books up in the attic, the Encyclopedia Brittanica's and a few odd (and typically old) books that it couldn't find.

I started on 8th August and, on average, put in between 15-30 minutes each day. There are about 3000 of them (and no I haven't read them all).

Here's a few comments on the Delicious Library software I used on my Mac to do this. See also the previous post on just how easy it was to enter the book information.

First the good news:

With the hardbacks and trade paperbacks that had barcodes on them, the iSight camera usually did a good job of scanning the barcode and getting the correct information. My entry time per book was 5-15 seconds for these.
Ironically it couldn't read the barcodes on The Invisible Computer by Don Norman and Being Digital by Nicolas Negroponte and there was no barcode or even an ISBN number on Sun's "Open Minds" 10 year anniversary book. For the latter, it's easy to just create a custom library entry.
I'm totally impressed that I can find a book in my library by just speaking its name. Awesome. When it works. Quite often it doesn't. This might just mean I need to calibrate my microphone or adjust the speech recognition settings a bit.
I really like the output format (all 35 pages of it) when I print as a PDF (although if I print "by title", the first entry is being printed out in a large font at the top of the first page and ruining the header. I've reported that, but haven't heard anything back yet.
I love the information you get back from Amazon for each book. Delicious Library makes it easy to buy books via Amazon and to sell your own books there too. It can easily show you what other similar books are available. Lots of other great little features like this.

Now the not quite so good news:

The barcodes on mass-market paperbacks were useless. After failing for about ten in a row, I simply resorted to typing in the ISBN numbers. Most of these paperbacks are over two years old. I can only assume that Amazon just knows about the very latest printing of each one. For these my entry time per book went up to about 15-20 seconds. Still not that bad. For the really old ones, I ended up either entering them via title and author and then guessing which one I had from the list of available choices. Quite often I'd get the version (i.e. the publisher) wrong.
The popup with the weird negative error number when the camera went into an error state (I think because I unplugged it), instead of a useful meaningful description of what the problem really was. That was so 1970's.
There were also several instances where the camera just froze. It would then unfreeze itself and continue working nicely after 10-20 seconds.
For a lot of my books, it couldn't find the art work on Amazon for that book, so the library entry looks like it's covered in brown butchers paper. Admittedly I have several books in my real library that look just like that, so it's a nice compromise. But if I start getting anal, I can see myself wanting to find the art work for each missing book cover and add it to the library. That is amazing easy though. You just drag and drop the image to the blank dotted image area for that entry.
For several of my books, I had to look up the book on Amazon, then cut and paste the ISBN number for the book into the entry in Delicious Library. You are supposedly able to drag and drop an Amazon book URL onto Delicious Library, but that just wouldn't work for me. Not a big deal.

Features I'd like to see:

When providing you with a list of possible alternatives for the title and author you've entered, it would be nice if the list information included the publisher and the date of publication so it would be easier to differentiate between them.
If the "lookup failed" on a bar code, it would be nice to see if it could read the ISBN numbers on the barcode tag. More often or not, these are written in a "standard font", so I'd like to think it was possible.
I'd like to be able to do special queries on my books. For example, I'd like to pick an author, and get the software to tell me what books by that author I don't currently have. Or a list of all books published before 1950. Or all books published by O'Reilly. And other similar search criteria.

Overall I'm still highly impressed with this software. While I was entering my library, an update for the application became available. Up came a popup asking me if I wanted to update now or later. When I eventually did go to update it, it automatically downloaded the new version and restarted it. All from a single mouse click.

[Technorati Tag: Library]