Comments on: Delicious Monster

By: Molly Moloney

Molly Moloney — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 03:01:54 +0000

I’ve used a similar program—Readerware—on my PC for the past couple of years, (available at readerware.org). It might not be quite as cute as this one, but it seems to have most of the same features. The bar code scanning I do with the free cue cat (some of which are still floating around out there, I believe). It also gets information from Amazon (and you can export your entire Amazon purchase history into the db in one fell swoop), but it also looks up book info from other online booksellers and the Library of Congress. I can also send the database PDA, so I always have a catalog of my books with me (which actually comes in handy more than you might think, at least for those of us with way too many books). (the PDA functionality is less robust than the program overall, though). The software helps satisfy some of my geeky need to index and catalog (and my unhealthy obsession w acquiring more books) , but I too have wished that I could do more with the software, integrating it with Endnote capabilities, etc. Still, though, I’m happy that I have it.

By: jo.

jo. — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 03:39:26 +0000

Why on earth would anyone want an in-computer catalog of all the books he/she owns? I mean, I’m sure some people do want such a thing. But for what purpose? Heavens, what are you doing on an academic blog? Books = the universal good. She who dies with the most books wins. Buy books, not food. Toy that allows you play with your books = joy. This is cool—so cool, in fact, that it may even get me to switch. Except Mac doesn’t support Wordperfect, and everything I’ve written is in that format. Including my just-about-ready-for-the-publisher manuscript, which I do not want to reformat.

By: Enrique

Enrique — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 22:49:58 +0000

Wouldn’t it also be useful for cataloguing for insurance purposes? As a movie junkie, I’d like to know I could get full value for my out of print Criterion DVDs if I can show my insurance company I had them in case of fire and what not.

By: clew

clew — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:43:45 +0000

Oh, and of course exporting to a bibliographic program would be good, and a catalog also should keep track of digital resources (.pdf files of research papers, or RFCs, or literate code, or so forth) and my comments on them, so that I don’t need to know what format I have information in, I can search for the information. Indexes happen to be copyrightable independent of the work they index, so while jon h’s idea is excellent, I don’t think it’s free of IP tripfalls.

By: clew

clew — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:37:39 +0000

Is this as Amazon-dependent as it seems? because not only is Amazon pretty useless for anything too old or obscure to have an ISBN, but I’ve found (while trying out Books) that Amazon’s info for current ISBNs isn’t nearly as good as that of the LoC, or OCLC (whichever the other default Books suggests is). Amazon has many errors in basic bibliographic info, and is just awful at subject heads and subheads. That is, their backend seems quite good at it, but not the data they exported. The benefit of having a database of one’s books, IMO, is to be able to search by their several subjects, instead of wondering if a book on the history of British X is shelved with history, or British, or X, or funny-sized books. Later I want to have Friend-Of-A-Friend catalogs so I can find out if anyone who gives me lending privs has a book.

By: tina

tina — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:53:41 +0000

That is SO COOL!!

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 03:19:49 +0000

Why on earth would anyone want an in-computer catalog of all the books he/she owns? I mean, I’m sure some people do want such a thing. But for what purpose? Well, I think my post basically acknowledged that there are people of the first sort (cf Mary Kay), said that I’m not quite one of them, and suggested a few extensions to DL that would put that catalog to work in different ways. Siracusa’s review has a bunch of suggestions, too.

By: Michael Blowhard

Michael Blowhard — Sun, 14 Nov 2004 23:42:59 +0000

Why on earth would anyone want an in-computer catalog of all the books he/she owns? I mean, I’m sure some people do want such a thing. But for what purpose?

By: D

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:22:41 +0000

I have been wanting sell off a good part of my library (just because I am sick of having all this stuff around) and this set-up might be just the thing to enable a mass posting/pricing on eBay.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:30:59 +0000

Sounds kind of cool except a majority of the stuff I would want to catalog is sans bar code. Well… looking at my bookcase I realize probably a slim majority of the books do have barcodes on them; but the ones central to my “collection”, the books dearest to my heart, are almost universally lacking one. Not really an issue for Windows-using me anyways.

By: Spoilt Victorian Child

Spoilt Victorian Child — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 20:04:13 +0000

Though I imagine that most PC users will find that review completely insufferable, it’s probably the most concise explanation of why I have always been and will always be a Mac nerd.

By: Mary Kay

Mary Kay — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 16:56:21 +0000

As someone who once earned quite a nice living cataloging books for libraries, I mildly resent the suggestion such work is obsessive geekery. I’d love to have our collection cataloged because we end with far too many dups. Of course, this assumes keeping the catalog updated, but as an obsessive geek I don’t find this particularly daunting. MKK

By: Jon H

Jon H — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 06:42:17 +0000

What I’d like for them to do is let you search the printed indexes of all your books. Users could scan in the indexes of their books, OCR them, and submit the information to the company’s server, similar to submitting track info to CDDB. When you scan in a barcode for a book, instead of just getting the publication data and cover image, you could download a chunk of data encapsulating that book’s printed index. Then, you could search for a term, and the program would display any index entries it appears in, from any of your books. It wouldn’t be full-text search, but it’d still be pretty useful, I should think. And much less work to implement than full-text, and less fraught with IP tripfalls.

By: Delicious Pundit

Delicious Pundit — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 06:32:45 +0000

Seriously, though, it sounds pretty cool. If only it would tell me where the goddamn book is in my house right now.

By: Delicious Pundit

Delicious Pundit — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 06:16:21 +0000

Delicious!