Coming from Delicious Library.

What actually happened

In late November 2024, Amazon withdrew Delicious Library's access to its Product Advertising API. That feed supplied the titles, publication details and cover art behind the app's barcode scanning, so the lookup that made cataloguing feel effortless simply stopped returning results. The app was withdrawn from sale shortly afterwards and has not been updated since 2021.

It was a genuinely lovely piece of Mac software, and it deserves to be remembered as more than a cautionary tale about depending on somebody else's API.

Your copy still works

Nothing was switched off remotely, and your library has not been taken away. If you still have Delicious Library installed:

• It still opens, and your collection is still in it.
• You can still browse, search and edit the records you already have.
• You can still add items by typing the details in yourself.
• What no longer works is automatic lookup — scanning a barcode or searching for a title returns nothing, and no cover art arrives.

So there is no emergency. The real risk is slower than that: the app has had no maintenance since 2021, and at some point a macOS update will stop it launching. That is the reason to export your data while it still opens, whatever you decide to do next.

Whether BookTrakdB is the right move for you

Delicious Library catalogued books, films, music, video games and assorted other things. BookTrakdB catalogues books — printed books, eBooks and audiobooks — and does that one job thoroughly.

If your shelves were mostly books, this is a straightforward swap. If they were mostly DVDs, Blu-rays and CDs, it is not, and I would rather say so now than after you have spent an evening on it. A companion application for discs is in early design. There is no date, and I am not going to invent one.

Getting your data out

In Delicious Library, use File → Export To → Another Application. That produces an XML file containing your collection.

Do this first, before you evaluate anything — including BookTrakdB — and keep a copy somewhere safe. An export you can still read in ten years is worth having even if you end up choosing a different app entirely. Years of cataloguing is not something to leave inside software that no longer has a maintainer.

Bringing it into BookTrakdB

There is no direct Delicious Library import yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Today the route is:

1. Export the XML from Delicious Library.
2. Download the BookTrakdB spreadsheet template.
3. Map your fields across — title, author, format, ISBN, ratings, notes and so on.
4. Import the spreadsheet. The import preview shows you duplicates and conflicting values before anything is written, so you can review the whole batch and abandon it if it does not look right. Imports are all-or-nothing: if something fails part way, nothing is left behind.

Step three is manual, and for a large collection it is an evening's work. That is the honest state of it.

Send me your export and I will build the importer

I would like to make that middle step disappear, and the only thing stopping me is that I have no real file to build against. Delicious Library's export varies depending on how long you used it and what you catalogued, and a converter written against a guess would fail on the first genuine library it met.

If you are willing to share your exported XML — the whole thing, or a trimmed section with a few dozen records — I will use it to build and test a direct importer, and I will let you know when it works. Use the contact form to get in touch — no account needed.

What will feel familiar

• Barcode scanning. Point your phone at the back of a book and the details and cover come in.
• Cover art and metadata lookup, with the record only updated once you have reviewed what was proposed.
• A detailed record per book rather than a title and an author and nothing else.
• Multiple shelves. They are called libraries here, and books move between them.
• Lending. Record who has a book and when it comes back.

What will not

There is no wooden bookshelf. BookTrakdB is a catalogue — a list you can sort, filter and shape into the columns you care about — not a photorealistic room. If the shelf was the whole point for you, this will be a disappointment, and that is a fair reason to look elsewhere.

It also runs in a browser as well as on macOS, so the same catalogue is available from a phone while you are standing in front of the actual shelves. The macOS application keeps its library offline on your own Mac, with no limit on the number of books.

The dependency that caused all this

Worth being direct about, because it is the obvious question: BookTrakdB does not use Amazon. Book details and covers come from Open Library, the Internet Archive and Google Books, and if one of them does not answer, it falls back to another.

That is not a guarantee — anyone who tells you their data source is permanent is guessing. But three independent sources, two of them run by non-profits, is a materially different risk from a single commercial feed that can be withdrawn by one company's decision. That lesson was learned at Delicious Library's expense.

Delicious Library is a trademark of Delicious Monster Software. BookTrakdB is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Delicious Monster in any way. This page exists because people have asked what to do with their collections, and everything on it is stated as accurately as I can manage.