Delicious Library is one of those Mac OS X applications that you wouldn’t expect to find yourself using, however its wonderful combination of interface, ease-of-use, and its delectable Mac OS X integration make it a rather fun application to play around with. All the power behind it makes it by far the premier application for managing your library of books, movies, music, games, and more.

By far, the most amazing feature in Delicious Library concerns how you add items into the program. Believe it or not–and I had a hard time believing this at first–Delicious Library can integrate with an iSight camera, your MacBook/iMac’s built-in webcam, or any FireWire DV camera to scan in your items by barcode. All you have to do is click on the camera icon, which displays a preview window with your image in black and white and a collection of red “scanner” lines going across the image. You’re expected to hold up the barcode to the camera so that at least one of the red lines goes through the whole barcode. When Delicious Library reads the barcode, it emits a beep, and then goes on Amazon.com to try to find all the information for the item you just scanned. Scanning works fairly well as long as you’re in a well-lit area, however it can be difficult to easily hold a barcode up to the webcam on my MacBook without shaking it a bit, which makes it much harder for Delicious Library to scan. Delicious Monster, the company behind the software, states themselves that although scanning this way is faster than entering info by hand, it’s not the fastest thing in the world. However, they do resell a Bluetooth Wireless Scanner at an exclusive price of $180 for die-hard Delicious Library users (such as users keeping track of a whole library, for example). The benefit here is that you can take the scanner to the books, instead of taking the books to the scanner (aka the computer). Delicious Library is also compatible with a number of USB Scanners.

If for some reason you aren’t able to scan your items into Delicious Library, you can still make good use of the program, although you lose some of the coolness factor. By clicking the + button, you can enter an item’s UPC, ISBN, or ASIN serial number next to the barcode icon and Delicious Library will try to find a match in Amazon’s directory. For the items that I imported, usually 80-85% of them could find a match for Amazon. For the ones that couldn’t find a match, Delicious Library also lets you enter the title or Amazon URL of the item you’re looking for in order to pick a match. Delicious Library then displays all your items on a scrollable bookshelf, showing off each item’s cover image, or if it couldn’t find a cover image, an image of a book that looks as though it had been covered with a paper grocery bag and the name of the item typed on the cover. You can easily sort the items on a number of different criteria, and labels on each level of the shelves indicate which authors are in that shelf (e.g. I have mine sorted alphabetically by author, and so one shelf has a label that says “Hall to Lee”). Of course, you can also search and resize your items, similar to iPhoto.

Delicious Library comes with a couple of pre-configured collections (Books, Movies, Music, Games) and a special “Recent Import” collection. You can also add your own collections, however one inconsistency within the program is that the application window refers to these as collections while the menu bar refers to these as “shelves”.

Delicious Library also includes a nice selection of smaller features which let you do more to manage your library. Whenever you view info for a particular item, there’s a Similar tab on the lower-right that you can select to show a number of similar items to the one you selected, along with links to open them in Amazon. It even includes support for Mac OS X Speakable Items (remember what that is?) to search through the library. If you want to use it to help keep track of your collection, Delicious Library can even print out a good-looking, concise list of your collection, complete with thumbnails of covers. And another nice feature, Delicious Library allows you to import your Address Book contacts as “Borrowers” and track items that you lend to them to borrow, including when they’re due back. Although this can be nice for tracking items you lend to friends, this kind of feature can even make Delicious Library all the software you need for managing an actual small library.

All in all, Delicious Library is a very well-designed app that makes it practically painless to manage your collections of books, movies, music, games, and more. Plus, stay tuned for Delicious Library 2, which is supposed to have some really cool Leopard functionality when it comes out (it won the Apple Design Award for Best Leopard Application).

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Tags: Apple, Apple Design Award, barcode, books, catalog, games, iSight, library, Mac, movies, music, review, scanner, Software