Oh my God. As you know, I really get a kick out of having the computer interact with the real world. I love scanners, which allow your computer to “see”, and I’m fascinated whenever I print something on a printer in a different building over a network.
Imagine my delight with Delicious Library. This is a tool (Mac-only) that works as follows: 1. Start the program; 2. hold a book or CD or DVD or video game in front of your iSight camera so that it can see the barcode on the back of the book; 3. the program reads the barcode and imports all relevant information on the book from Amazon or some such; 4. and adds it to your library so you can e.g. keep track of whom you lent the book. It will also let you assign due dates for books you lent out and put them into your iCal calendar, but that’s just sick.
It’s not like I’m going to use this in any major way, and certainly I won’t pay a $40 registration fee for being able to have a library with more than 25 entries or synchronise it with my iPod. But it sure beats the hell out of the book database that I wrote when I was 15. And imagine how helpful this tool would be for an actual small lending library. This is so awesome. :)
Now, back to work.
