This is kind of neat. There’s a really slick app for the Mac OS X called Delicious Library that catalogs your books, DVDs, CDs, and videogames. You can use a webcam (like the iSight) to scan in the UPC codes from your collection, it’ll look up the info for it on Amazon, and file it all away. It’s a boon for anal-retentive people like myself, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it’s kind of fun to scan all the stuff in, just for the nerdy “gee-whiz” element of it.
Of course, it’s pretty useless as is; once you’ve scanned everything in, it starts to sink in that you’ve just got a list of all your books and movies and not much to do with it. (It has gimmicky features like a lender check-out that syncs up with your Address Book in case you’re always lending stuff out to friends, and it’ll download the info to your iPod, which would be useful if I carried my iPod with me everywhere.)
Well, somebody finally wrote a somewhat useful add-on for it, the DeliciousExporter, which takes your library info and outputs it to half slick, half cheesy HTML format. So now everyone can take a look at my collection. (Disclaimer: I’ve only scanned in my bedside bookshelf so far, where I keep all the comic books and cheesy science fiction. I swear I do own real books and will enter them at some point.)