The books I scan in an evening

So I bought Delicious Library.

I've scanned all the books except graphic novels and paperbacks. This is sort of like saying I've scaled all of Everest except the last 29,000 feet, but it's enough to give me a feel for the program itself.

Scanning with an iSight is pretty badass. You put a bar code in front of it, and it beeps, then a second or two later, speaks the title and author aloud. So you grab a book, wave it in front of the computer until it beeps, reshelve it while listening to how badly /usr/bin/say mangles the title, repeat until you run out of books or die. I'll probably die first.

This is how it works about 80% of the time for my collection. However, I have a deep and abiding love for pulp Sci-Fi, particularly short story anthologies. These pre-date barcodes by about three decades, minimum. So the actual process is grab a stack of books, make an "un-scannable artifacts of yore" pile next to the laptop, and then proceed. After every shelf, sit down and start typing.

So what's the payoff from this? Well, I get to search my collection. Since it's totally unsorted, this is kind of a big deal. I have actually bought books again because I couldn't find my old one. I can also publish it to the web, and I think there might be an iPhone app or something.

Edit: Protip: mass-market paperbacks, which are the bulk of my collection, have two barcodes on them (or none at all). There's the one on the back, like every other book, and the one in the inside front cover. Only the inside front cover one works. If you scan the one on the back, you'll get some Tae-Bo DVD, or Larry Niven's Ringworld. Which may have been somewhat useful, since I do own like four copies of Ringworld.