- 1. How exactly is Bookpedia better?
2. Will I be able to import my rather large Delicious Library collection into Bookpedia?
3. I've noticed a reference or two to BibTeX export on the forums, though the feature list on the main site only mentions MLA export. Is BibTeX export now a feature, and does it work well?
switching from Delicious Library
switching from Delicious Library
As a registered user of Delicious Library, I guess I wouldn't normally be considered a prime candidate to buy Bookpedia. But after searching around on these forums I notice that several people have made the switch and have compared Bookpedia very favorably to Delicious Library. To help me make a decision, I wonder if some of those people could address my questions in however much detail you're willing to go into?
Why I like BP better than DL...
First, a copuple of things you should know:
- I have a library of around 2,000 books
- I am an owner/user of Readerware, Delicious Library, and now Bookpedia
- There are several references to a DL 2 on Wil Shipley's (creater of DL) most excellent web site, Wil Shipley, which hint at addressing several of my beefs
So, why do I like BP better than DL... for now...
1. Speed. DL is slow, plain and simple. I have a dual 2.5GHz G5 power Mac with 4.5GB of RAM, and it still takes about 25 bounces to open DL and easily 15 seconds to close it. Scrolling in icon view is very sluggish, and even the table view is not so fast. This must be a common complaint, and it is one of the key things Wil talks about addressing in his Blog. Bookpedia, at least for now, is the overwhelming speed winner.
2. Importing. Put simply, importing a library into DL is a pain. I had to go through some serious hoops to get my Readerware library into DL, even when DL supposedly will import from RW directly. BP makes importing a library very easy.
3. Multiple book entry. This is a big one for me. There is no way in DL to, say, barcode scan 10 books and then have it look them up and add them to your library. You must do them one at a time.
4. Custom fields. RW has 10 (overkill). BP has 4 (just right for me). DL has none. In fairness, two of the items I use custom fields for (series index # and owner) are dedicated fields in DL.
5. Bookpedia's statistics view. Sort of an answer looking for a problem, but I like it a lot.
6. BP's ability to customize export templates, and to publish on .mac
7. The very large number of lookup sources in BP as compared to DL. DL only references Amazon sites, and even then only 1 at a time. So, when I have to look up a UK book, I have to go into Preferences and switch to Amazon UK.
8. BP supports Smart Collections similar to iTunes. Very, very nice.
9. BP, for no reason that I can really put my finger on yet, seems to be better focused on "serious" bibliophiles. Perhaps it is the far richer set of metadata for the books. Not sure.
10. Nice EULA. Buy BP and put it on any mac in the same family (under the same roof).
All that said, DL has some things I like better... for now...
1. There is a reason DL almost won Apple's 2005 Design Award. The UI is beautiful.
2. DL essentially integrates all of the pedias into a single app, for the cost of all of the pedias. I pesonally like this integration a lot, but others might consider it a big negative.
3. I thnk DL handles Borrows better.
In conclusion...
An unlicensed version of BP is supposed to only let you enter 10 books, but I was able to import my entire library. Perhaps the limit is on manual entry. I imagine you will be able to demo BP with your full collection to see how it performs.
$18 is almost free. If all you need is Bookpedia, then buying it to compare and contrast is not a huge deal.
Wil Shiply is a very talented software engineer. Given how impressive DL is in version 1.xxx, I imagine that verison 2.xxx will be a sock knocker-offer. Of course, BP 3.01 is available now. DL 2.0 is, as far as I know, is still just a teaser in a Blog.
- I have a library of around 2,000 books
- I am an owner/user of Readerware, Delicious Library, and now Bookpedia
- There are several references to a DL 2 on Wil Shipley's (creater of DL) most excellent web site, Wil Shipley, which hint at addressing several of my beefs
So, why do I like BP better than DL... for now...
1. Speed. DL is slow, plain and simple. I have a dual 2.5GHz G5 power Mac with 4.5GB of RAM, and it still takes about 25 bounces to open DL and easily 15 seconds to close it. Scrolling in icon view is very sluggish, and even the table view is not so fast. This must be a common complaint, and it is one of the key things Wil talks about addressing in his Blog. Bookpedia, at least for now, is the overwhelming speed winner.
2. Importing. Put simply, importing a library into DL is a pain. I had to go through some serious hoops to get my Readerware library into DL, even when DL supposedly will import from RW directly. BP makes importing a library very easy.
3. Multiple book entry. This is a big one for me. There is no way in DL to, say, barcode scan 10 books and then have it look them up and add them to your library. You must do them one at a time.
4. Custom fields. RW has 10 (overkill). BP has 4 (just right for me). DL has none. In fairness, two of the items I use custom fields for (series index # and owner) are dedicated fields in DL.
5. Bookpedia's statistics view. Sort of an answer looking for a problem, but I like it a lot.
6. BP's ability to customize export templates, and to publish on .mac
7. The very large number of lookup sources in BP as compared to DL. DL only references Amazon sites, and even then only 1 at a time. So, when I have to look up a UK book, I have to go into Preferences and switch to Amazon UK.
8. BP supports Smart Collections similar to iTunes. Very, very nice.
9. BP, for no reason that I can really put my finger on yet, seems to be better focused on "serious" bibliophiles. Perhaps it is the far richer set of metadata for the books. Not sure.
10. Nice EULA. Buy BP and put it on any mac in the same family (under the same roof).
All that said, DL has some things I like better... for now...
1. There is a reason DL almost won Apple's 2005 Design Award. The UI is beautiful.
2. DL essentially integrates all of the pedias into a single app, for the cost of all of the pedias. I pesonally like this integration a lot, but others might consider it a big negative.
3. I thnk DL handles Borrows better.
In conclusion...
An unlicensed version of BP is supposed to only let you enter 10 books, but I was able to import my entire library. Perhaps the limit is on manual entry. I imagine you will be able to demo BP with your full collection to see how it performs.
$18 is almost free. If all you need is Bookpedia, then buying it to compare and contrast is not a huge deal.
Wil Shiply is a very talented software engineer. Given how impressive DL is in version 1.xxx, I imagine that verison 2.xxx will be a sock knocker-offer. Of course, BP 3.01 is available now. DL 2.0 is, as far as I know, is still just a teaser in a Blog.
can't import Delicious Library collection
Rather than delay, I decided to go ahead and download Bookpedia to try it out. I've been unable to import anything from Delicious Library. I choose Import Collection from the File menu then navigate to my Library Media Data.xml file from Delicious Library. An Adding Entries progress bar appears for about a second and then disappears after doing nothing.
Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks,
Rick
Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks,
Rick
Scanning books with the iSight
A discovery I made after downloading Bookpedia: the scanning function is awful compared to that of Delicious Library. With Delicious Library you can basically wave the book in front of the camera, while with Bookpedia you have to adjust the distance, get the barcode exactly centered and not slanted, then do it again because you didn't hold it steady enough for long enough.
As frozilla mentioned, $18 isn't a vast amount of money. Delicious Library's export functions are poor so I need something else for that purpose. If I can just crack the import-into-Bookpedia-from-Delicious-Library problem, I can imagine inputting books into Library and periodically transferring new titles into Pedia for organizing and export.
As frozilla mentioned, $18 isn't a vast amount of money. Delicious Library's export functions are poor so I need something else for that purpose. If I can just crack the import-into-Bookpedia-from-Delicious-Library problem, I can imagine inputting books into Library and periodically transferring new titles into Pedia for organizing and export.
Importing from DL...
Oh please, call me Fro.
Anyway, I used the Export feature of DL, which produced a tab-delimited text file. BP seemed to handle reading this type of file fine, but you do have to map the various fields. Don't bother with stuff that will just get sucked back off of Amazon. After the import, I then selected everthing and told BP to Get Advanced Info For Selection from Amazon US. About 40 minutes later, my library was updated.
If you really are adventuresome, I have a perl script that will parse DL's xml data file, but you will have to hack it to get what you want.
Anyway, I used the Export feature of DL, which produced a tab-delimited text file. BP seemed to handle reading this type of file fine, but you do have to map the various fields. Don't bother with stuff that will just get sucked back off of Amazon. After the import, I then selected everthing and told BP to Get Advanced Info For Selection from Amazon US. About 40 minutes later, my library was updated.
If you really are adventuresome, I have a perl script that will parse DL's xml data file, but you will have to hack it to get what you want.
Re: Scanning books with the iSight
All too true, unfortunately... I find myself scanning in Delicious Library, then cutting/pasting the UPCs into the Pedias... On the other hand DL is useless when it comes to handling very large collections, importing beyond Amazon, etc. I do hope that Bruji vastly improves iSight scanning in the future -- it is my only real complaint with the ***Pedias. They are vastly superior to Delicious Library in most other ways.rickl wrote:A discovery I made after downloading Bookpedia: the scanning function is awful compared to that of Delicious Library. With Delicious Library you can basically wave the book in front of the camera, while with Bookpedia you have to adjust the distance, get the barcode exactly centered and not slanted, then do it again because you didn't hold it steady enough for long enough.
Ted
Scanning woes...
I guess I don't understand why you don't just type the ISBN number manually if scanning is a pain. That's got to be easier than scanning into DL and then porting the data over to BP. If iSight scanning is a requirement, I guess I would build a simple jig. Mount your iSight in some fixed location relative to a base with a stop that has a center mark. That way, you just put you book against the stop and you know it is centered, square, and at the right focal depth. Probably pretty easy to do you have a magnet-mount iSight.
manual input faster than scanning?
When I first got Delicious Library, I seriously wondered whether it was worth carting my books across the room to the computer and then back after scanning and I did try manual input for a while. My conclusion was that scanning was quite a bit faster, though the advantages were somewhat offset by the tendency of Library to crash when it didn't recognize a barcode. With Bookpedia, I'm sure it makes more sense to input manually.I guess I don't understand why you don't just type the ISBN number manually if scanning is a pain. That's got to be easier than scanning into DL and then porting the data over to BP.
In any case, I guess these arguments apply mainly to first-time users who want to input 100s of books in one session. For subsequent occasional purchases, maybe it doesn't really matter how you input.
Re: Importing from DL...
I realized my mistake not long after posting my earlier message: the DL file can't be read just as it is. I exported to tab-delimited format and then opened it in Excel and deleted irrelevant columns. It was a bit easier to choose the appropriate mappings after that. Unfortunately, one of the "irrelevant" columns was the UPC, which I presume is why Amazon didn't recognize any of the imported books. I decided to have another go in the morning.frozilla wrote: Anyway, I used the Export feature of DL, which produced a tab-delimited text file. BP seemed to handle reading this type of file fine, but you do have to map the various fields.
One unfortunate thing I noticed is that DL doesn't appear to have a place of publication field.
BTW, has anyone tried the BibTeX export?
I don't think that BP needs the UPC for an Amazon lookup. Just make sure that you map the ISBN and you should be fine. Amazon actually uses ASIN, which should be the same thing. BTW - BP is not so bright about ISBNs (an area readerware shines). If you have dashes, spaces, a lower case 'x', etc, the lookup will fail. It's as if BP treats the ISBN as a text field and tried to do an exact match with it. This was the biggest annoyance I had importing my wife's library. She was just using an excel sheet, and had ISBNs with dashes and lower case 'x's.
Re: Scanning books with the iSight
If you would like to do it even faster, get a barcode scanner like the Cue Cat. You can get a modified USB Cue Cat on eBay for about $13.50. (Search on both "Cuecat" and "Cue Cat" plus USB--you don't want the PS2 version.) It plugs into a USB port (it's USB 1.1, so it should work plugged into the keyboard). All the 'pedias will recognize it. It should light up--the LED may flash, but it will run steadily if you hold the Cue Cat against something. In one of the 'pedias, use the add multiple command. Make sure that the cursor is in the UPC line. Scan the barcode with the Cue Cat. It takes a little practice, but it's not difficult. You don't want to go slowly, but do hold the Cue Cat perpendicular to the surface and right against it. If there are smudges, bits of labels, etc., on the barcode, it may not scan.rickl wrote:A discovery I made after downloading Bookpedia: the scanning function is awful compared to that of Delicious Library. With Delicious Library you can basically wave the book in front of the camera, while with Bookpedia you have to adjust the distance, get the barcode exactly centered and not slanted, then do it again because you didn't hold it steady enough for long enough.
Occasionally, you'll run across a barcode that has extra numbers--like 00--at the end, separated by a space. If so, highlight that entry in the list and edit those numbers out.
There are other barcode scanners. The developers of Delicious Library even sell a couple--one of theirs is wireless and has a built-in memory. Those are rather expensive, though, compared to the Cue Cat.
Some trivia: the Cue Cat was originally made for scanning codes in magazine reviews and ads. That would send a web browser to a page with the product shown in the ad or review. A neat idea, but it never caught on very well.
switching from Delicious Library
I had to take a few days off from this, but have now bought Bookpedia and settled to my temporary satisfaction most of the issues I brought up, thanks to you guys' help.
As Fro pointed out, the UPC doesn't appear to be necessary. I think that my fiddling around in Excel had messed things up. This time, I reexported my Delicious Library library and imported it immediately, only bothering to map the key fields, such as author, title, publisher, and ASIN. The Get Advanced Info command managed to find nearly all the titles. I temporarily lost the book covers for titles that I had had to scan myself, but they were easily dragged in from iPhoto. The biggest problem was that all the Japanese titles were rendered in unreadable characters, which nevertheless appeared to be understood by Bookpedia. In any case I retyped the titles.
One problem I have is a few titles that Bookpedia couldn't resolve. That in itself isn't a problem, but after tracking them down with a manual search I wanted to tell Bookpedia: "Look, this is what I'm referring to." Unfortunately, the link field doesn't seem to fulfill that function, and I couldn't find anywhere else to paste the link to the book.
I've been trying out the export to .Mac function, and it works well. It certainly puts Delicious Library to shame. I'm going to have to spend a little time fiddling with the templates to get a look that I really like. A problem is that, even where I've stipulated Amazon Japan for the advanced info, the exported web page always seems to point people to Amazon.com for each title.
I also tried out the BibTeX export. The lack of this in DL was always a pet peeve, but now I'm thinking I made too big a deal of that. My thinking was that, since the things we refer to in bibliographies and the things we store in DL or Bookpedia are the same things, it was wasteful to be entering or downloading the same info twice. In practice, though, the information available from Amazon is rather deficient (no place of publication; the year of publication is often wrong; often only one out of several authors is shown; series and other miscellaneous information is conflated with the title) so even after importing the BibTeX into a reference manager it has to be tidied up there. I'll have to fiddle around a bit and see what workflow makes sense. Any thoughts?
I have to say that I agree with Fro that, at this stage, Bookpedia seems to me to go way beyond Delicious Library. It seems such a pity that the Mac press and blogging community were such suckers for Delicious Library when it came out, John Siracusa's sycophantic review being a prime example. I honestly believed for quite a long time that it was the first and only application of its kind, and I'm glad that I finally found out that there are plenty of alternatives and that at least one of them is better overall.
At the same time, I've regained some respect for Delicious Library. It's easy to take for granted the scanning ability once you've used it for a while, but Delicious Library's is so good once you compare it to Bookpedia's that you have to wonder whether maybe they put a disproportionate effort into perfecting the scanning routines, at the expense of performance with large libraries.
As Fro pointed out, the UPC doesn't appear to be necessary. I think that my fiddling around in Excel had messed things up. This time, I reexported my Delicious Library library and imported it immediately, only bothering to map the key fields, such as author, title, publisher, and ASIN. The Get Advanced Info command managed to find nearly all the titles. I temporarily lost the book covers for titles that I had had to scan myself, but they were easily dragged in from iPhoto. The biggest problem was that all the Japanese titles were rendered in unreadable characters, which nevertheless appeared to be understood by Bookpedia. In any case I retyped the titles.
One problem I have is a few titles that Bookpedia couldn't resolve. That in itself isn't a problem, but after tracking them down with a manual search I wanted to tell Bookpedia: "Look, this is what I'm referring to." Unfortunately, the link field doesn't seem to fulfill that function, and I couldn't find anywhere else to paste the link to the book.
I've been trying out the export to .Mac function, and it works well. It certainly puts Delicious Library to shame. I'm going to have to spend a little time fiddling with the templates to get a look that I really like. A problem is that, even where I've stipulated Amazon Japan for the advanced info, the exported web page always seems to point people to Amazon.com for each title.
I also tried out the BibTeX export. The lack of this in DL was always a pet peeve, but now I'm thinking I made too big a deal of that. My thinking was that, since the things we refer to in bibliographies and the things we store in DL or Bookpedia are the same things, it was wasteful to be entering or downloading the same info twice. In practice, though, the information available from Amazon is rather deficient (no place of publication; the year of publication is often wrong; often only one out of several authors is shown; series and other miscellaneous information is conflated with the title) so even after importing the BibTeX into a reference manager it has to be tidied up there. I'll have to fiddle around a bit and see what workflow makes sense. Any thoughts?
I have to say that I agree with Fro that, at this stage, Bookpedia seems to me to go way beyond Delicious Library. It seems such a pity that the Mac press and blogging community were such suckers for Delicious Library when it came out, John Siracusa's sycophantic review being a prime example. I honestly believed for quite a long time that it was the first and only application of its kind, and I'm glad that I finally found out that there are plenty of alternatives and that at least one of them is better overall.
At the same time, I've regained some respect for Delicious Library. It's easy to take for granted the scanning ability once you've used it for a while, but Delicious Library's is so good once you compare it to Bookpedia's that you have to wonder whether maybe they put a disproportionate effort into perfecting the scanning routines, at the expense of performance with large libraries.
Due to the large number of switchers I have integrated a direct import of the Delicious Library XML into Bookpedia (DVDpedia, CDpedia and Gamepedia as well).
John Siracusa is friends with Will Shipley hence the review and the constant mention of Library on Arstechnica. Mr. Shipley has done a great job on the iSight scanning. He spent 6 months working on it; I just wish he would open source the barcode recognition. But then again you can't give away the one thing you excel at to your competitors. Everybody talks about the iSight scanning as if Delicious had brilliantly come up with the idea, but Booxter had it 4 months before Library even existed, and nobody ever gives Booxter any credit.
Thanks for all the great things you have said about Bookpedia, it is your support that earns us a living. I have also updated Bookpedia to remove dashes when sending the ISBN for an advance search.
John Siracusa is friends with Will Shipley hence the review and the constant mention of Library on Arstechnica. Mr. Shipley has done a great job on the iSight scanning. He spent 6 months working on it; I just wish he would open source the barcode recognition. But then again you can't give away the one thing you excel at to your competitors. Everybody talks about the iSight scanning as if Delicious had brilliantly come up with the idea, but Booxter had it 4 months before Library even existed, and nobody ever gives Booxter any credit.
Thanks for all the great things you have said about Bookpedia, it is your support that earns us a living. I have also updated Bookpedia to remove dashes when sending the ISBN for an advance search.
Booxter
Yes, Booxter is another program that I found out about after I had already bought Delicious Library... because, as I mention earlier in the thread, I honestly believed that DL represented a whole new category of software. If I had known about Booxter sooner, I might have rated it higher than Delicious Library.
I'm thinking of writing a long blog post about my experiences with book cataloging programs and how to use them at a university to support students' use of the library. Any other little historical tidbits like the one about Booxter being the first to do iSight scanning would be very welcome.
I'm thinking of writing a long blog post about my experiences with book cataloging programs and how to use them at a university to support students' use of the library. Any other little historical tidbits like the one about Booxter being the first to do iSight scanning would be very welcome.