I Don't Know If A Single Product Has Ever Been A More Perfect Match For Me

In any one person's life it is not often that he or she stumbles upon a single product so perfectly geared toward his or her interests that it simply MUST be owned.

Dear readers, I have found that product (with the help of Joe...thanks for the heads up Joe) I present to you: Delicious Library!



Check out the product description:

Get your Mac, a webcam, and Delicious Library and rediscover your home library. Just point any FireWire digital video camera, like an Apple iSight®, at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item's cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.

Once your whole library is cataloged, you can find and use your items like never before. Browse, sort, and search through your digital shelves. Sync your cataloged library onto your iPod or print a color catalog and take it with you. Find and purchase new items using Delicious Library's personalized recommendations. Keep track of the items your friends are borrowing using Delicious Library's loan management system, which integrates with Apple's Address Book and iCal.

Notice that not only will it keep track of all of your books, DVDs, CDs, and video games, but it will help to keep track of who is borrowing them at any given time! How cool is that! I often prefer not to loan things to people because I just don't like the risk of never seeing it again. It's not that I don't trust my friends, but things like this are usually easily avoided by not getting into the situation in the first place (to show that I know it is a two way street, as a policy I also prefer not to borrow things from people for the same reasons).

Other perks of the software appear to be:

- Spotlight Searching: Use the Tiger Spotlight Menu to search and find any item in your Delicious Library using almost any piece of associated information including release date, description, or check-out status. You can even create Finder Smart Folders using any of the over 30 custom Delicious Library search attributes. (Anyone who knows me well knows that I live for sorting stuff)

- Voice Search: Speak the title of any book, CD, DVD, or video game and it's instantly highlighted.

- Personal Ratings: Assign a one to five-star rating to any book, CD, DVD, or video game in your library, and mark if you've read/listened/viewed/played it yet. Sort your digital shelf by your rating so you can find your most hated stuff you have been meaning to get rid of.

- Custom Collections: Create your own shelf collections with a mix of any books, CDs, DVDs, and video games you want. Make a shelf for each actual shelf in your house, or make shelves for your favorite items, or make one filled with all of your references for a research paper. (This feature almost makes me burst at the seams).

- Bluetooth Scanning: Get our Flic® Wireless Laser Barcode Scanner to scan in the barcodes from your books, CDs, DVDs, and video games from all over your house or business — if you wander out of wireless range, the scanner automatically remembers up to 500 barcodes that will be imported the next time you're in range. (Umm. Seriously. Cool.)

I'm not sure I've ever been so excited about a product before in my entire life. Of course the only down side is that it appears to be available for Mac only, and I have forever been a PC user. To be quite honest, prior to learning about Delicious Library I was considering making my next home computer a Mac. The new MacBooks recently released by Apple seem to be really great machines, and the fact that they are designed to run Windows based programs combined with the amazing (for a Mac) price point, I think I am sold. Now I just need to think of a decent excuse to buy one as soon as possible.

Suffice to say that in the near future I will have to buy a MacBook and the first piece of software I plan to buy for it will be Delicious Library.