{"id":2409,"date":"2004-11-08T09:49:05","date_gmt":"2004-11-08T17:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/11\/08\/2409.html"},"modified":"2004-11-08T09:49:05","modified_gmt":"2004-11-08T17:49:05","slug":"good-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2004\/11\/08\/good-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Good morning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I woke up fretting about something or other, and lay in bed groggily for a while, but then it occurred to me that I had Mary Anne's copy of Jennifer Crusie's Tell Me Lies<\/cite>, which I'd been saving for a time when I needed cheering up. (For those of you just tuning in, I discovered not long ago that reading Jennifer Crusie pretty much invariably cheers me up.) Ms. Crusie worked her magic again, so by the time I got to my computer for morning email check, I was in a good mood.<\/p>\n

And then my email contained something that put me in an even better mood: an announcement that Delicious Monster's Mac OS X application Delicious Library<\/a> has been released. (Sadly, it's not available for any other operating system or for pre-OS-X Macs, and probably won't ever be.)<\/p>\n

I've been enthusiastically waiting for this for a couple months now, so I downloaded it and ran the demo. It's just what I've always wanted. I hold a book up in front of my iSight camera; the application reads the barcode and goes to Amazon and downloads author, title, format, price, publisher, release date, a cover photo, etc. You can also keep a list of \"Borrowers\" and track who has your books.<\/p>\n

It's a gorgeous application. I paid for it almost immediately.<\/p>\n

It does have one serious flaw: it failed on every mass-market paperback I tried. It appears to be ignoring the second part of the barcode for them, which causes it to misidentify them. But I've filed a bug about that, and I'm guessing\/hoping that they'll fix it quickly (or that it was pilot error on my part).<\/p>\n

I was thinking I would hold off on buying the application until that was fixed, but then I tried a couple more books. Seeing the cover of All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories<\/a><\/cite> appear on the little bookshelf in the application made my day. It likewise recognized almost all of the gorgeous Night Shade Press books I bought at WFC, including the Lambshead Guide<\/a><\/cite>. And Bruce Holland Rogers's small-press collection Thirteen Ways to Water and Other Stories<\/a><\/cite>. It recognized Borges's Collected Fictions<\/a><\/cite>, and Kelly's Stranger Things Happen<\/a><\/cite>, and From Porn to Poetry<\/a><\/cite> (the Clean Sheets<\/a><\/cite> anthology that includes the (ahem) J. Hartman story \"The Secret Life of Humphrey Milquer<\/a>,\" and I hope it's obvious that none of those last few items are work-safe), and even Mary Anne's Torn Shapes of Desire<\/a><\/cite> (also not work-safe).<\/p>\n

I'm half-tempted to stay home from work and scan books all day.<\/p>\n

It's silly for me to be so delighted that it recognized those books, of course; all it really means is that they're in Amazon's database. Whatever one can say against Amazon, the fact that they make small-press books easily and conveniently orderable is cool. I'm sure if they didn't exist, someone could put together a book database that would work much like the CDDB does for CDs, and eventually we'd have the same effect; but it's nice to not have to do that.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I woke up fretting about something or other, and lay in bed groggily for a while, but then it occurred…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}