I downloaded this just to try it out and ended up inputting my entire library, which I now know comes to 360 books. It's fun to scan and see the info and images of your books as they start to accumulate in the library. I am a scholar and I find that I'm loosing track of what I have. It is becomming more common that I accidently buy books I already own. So I see this as a great tool. I can check my database before I order books on line, and I can bring my iPod to bookstores with me (haven't tried iPod sync yet). I can see myself taking advantage of the loan feature, especially when I loan books to students.

It works best for newer, US published books, of course. Books from the past 15 years mostly seem to have barcodes which you can scan. Books for the past 20 years or so have ISBNs, so I inputted the isbn numbers for older books without bar codes. Books older than 20 years or so don't have ISBNs. You can find them by title, but the info you download will be from a newer edition.

Foreign books: I have a lot of books purchased in Brazil. That was hit and miss for some reason. Half scanned fine, another quarter could be entered using ISBN numbers and another quarter could not be found by this program. Most data downloaded came without pictures. That has to do with quality of the on-line databases this program searches.

Oddly my trashy paperback airport novels would not scan. But if I entered the ISBNs, the data and images would appear.

One problem that should be fixed: edited volumes end up with the author field blank.

Scanning: I have an iSight camera. I mounted the camera on my laptop and approached the book to the camera, watching the image on the screen until it came into focus. I found it worked better with good light, natural light from a window shining on the book. Where I had trouble was with shiny covers, especially on CDs (I tried a handfull of those). The glare caused problems and they wouldn't scan. Some books had strange colors that prevented them from scanning: dark red for example.

I haven't played with my new database much yet, but I like typing keywords in and seeing the covers of the books in my search results. It really is like seeing your books on the shelf. There is something about it that's better than seeing a text list of titles.

I'm not sure hardbound books should be represented as larger than paperbacks. Often they aren't actually bigger and I'm not sure what is gained by this convention.

I have a feeling the database won't be flexible enough for me. What I would love to see is integration with EndNote. I've used endnote for years to keep track of books and articles that are relavant for my research. But there is no elegant way to keep track of what I actually own, or to manage lending my books out. Of course EndNote does a much better job of storing bibliographic information. And it's a tool for writing and formatting academic texts that goes beyond the scope of Dilicious Library. Records in EndNote could have a button that would take you to the corresponding record in DL, and visa versa. Better still. EndNote could buy DL and integrate the scanning, cover art, and book lending features. EndNote could also adopt this sort of OSX style interface because the current EndNote interface is worthless.