I just entered a bunch of books into Delicious Library on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered entering anything into there since I got my new MacBook. Since the new MacBook has an iSight camera built in, I was kind of curious to see how the scanning function would work. Well, it scanned the bar codes OK, and came up with the correct UPCs, but it didn’t once pull the correct item for the UPC. I tried it on about ten books, and it didn’t work on any of them. I gave up, and went back to just typing in the ISBNs.
I then tried exporting from DL and importing to Amazon’s Media Library. I cut the ISBNs from DL’s export file, and pasted them into a separate text file, since Amazon seems to just want one ISBN per line, and nothing else. Amazon read in the file, and recognized about 20 items out of 80. Not a great success rate. I didn’t really try to troubleshoot that import at all, though, so maybe I messed something up. Amazon also has a scanning function similar to DL’s. I gave that a try, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my bar codes at all.
The thing that got me started on this was an attempt to figure out exactly which William Marshall books I own. Last night, I noticed one on Amazon (The Far Away Man) that didn’t sound familiar, so I ordered it. I guess there are a few others I haven’t read yet either, based on the list at Overbooked.