Using the Monster

This morning I connected Brooke’s iSight camera to my Powerbook and scanned all of my books into Delicious Library.

The scanning process was impressive: I rarely had to hold an item in front of the camera for more than a second before I heard a “success” beep; a few seconds (and a few queued scans) later, the name of the book was read back to me. Of the 231 books I own, 24 required manual entry. Twelve initially had no graphic (Google image search helped here); four were unknown even after manual ISBN entry. The entire effort took about ninety minutes.

So what is my library good for? I don’t know, really. I can’t export to web page; I can’t package up my library to share with friends. That said, I think my roommate Bud will like the app: he’s a book collector with somewhere near 3,000 books to his name. Delicious Library should allow him to build a complete (and metadata rich) database in about 19 hours.