Steal This Library!
In the post-dot-com boom world that we live in its almost not suprising to hear about a successful software company whose seven employees literally spend all day in a Seattle cafe.
The software that Delicious Monster has become famous for is called Delicious Library and it does exactly what it sounds like: it keeps track of your own personal library. What makes it revolutionary is that it can scan in barcodes and automatically download all the info on your DVDs, CDs and Books from the Internet. Want to keep track of who’s borrowing your stuff? No problem. But the killer feature is what is coming next:
But from the start, the software was planned to be social, allowing friends, neighbors and colleagues to see what’s in each others’ media libraries, and turn collections into personal lending libraries.
Version two, due later this year, will allow users to browse each other’s libraries. It will be location-aware, letting users know who has what in their neighborhood or city.
It will also work on local networks (using Apple Computer’s Rendezvous), so people can browse their colleagues’ or fellow students’ collections, just as Apple’s iTunes exposes other users’ playlists.
The software even has a recommendation system based on software from another famous Seattle dotcom: Amazon. Interestingly, when Delicious first approached the Bezos-drones they panicked. Realizing the power of the social side of the software they demanded to know who would buy books/dvds in a future where you can just borrow them?
Matas said the company talked to Amazon about a partnership, but the retailer didn’t like the lending feature. Why would people buy when they could borrow?
Matas said he convinced Amazon that people buy movies expressly to lend them out. They watch a movie two or three times, but want to own it so they can lend it to family or friends.
Amazon is not the only company to be shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. In the future when all media is digitized, people can store their entire libraries on a flash disk the size of a stamp. Want to borrow a book? How about the whole damn library?
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