Recreating Delicious Library

Wil Shipley (via Michael Tsai):

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

I closely follow Michael Tsai’s blog (and you should too, go add it to your feeds) but this bit of news somehow flew under my radar. That Delicious Library has to be retired is indeed the end of an era. The app had been going strong (and was a great example of good UI) for 20 years, and it’s sad to see great apps die just because someone at a Big Tech company decides to flip a switch.

I remember downloading a trial version of Delicious Library in late 2004 and at the time I really thought it was a nice solution for cataloguing my stuff. I ended up not using it, but the problem was me, not the app. I simply had too many things to catalogue. I could have turned the data entry into a daily habit — you know, scanning a bunch of items every day when I had some free time, and see my digitised library slowly grow and mirror my physical library — but twenty years ago I was far more impatient than I am now. The task seemed too daunting and I simply chickened out.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and I receive an email from Ding Yu, a reader of my blog whom I also know via X/Twitter. He’s a software developer based in Tokyo. And he’s had an idea:

I’m considering making a modern web version of the beloved Delicious Library, but I’m not sure this is something worth pursuing. I’ve put up my thoughts here: Recreating Delicious Library in 2025?

Prompted for feedback, I told him that I think it’s a very good idea. Despite not being a Delicious Library user myself, I’ve always thought it was a necessary application that would fit the cataloguing needs of a lot of people.

In writing my response to Ding, I also remembered my experience with Shelfari: I discovered it at the peak of its popularity, and I decided to give it a try. Maybe this time I would be more patient, so I started cataloguing my extensive book library. Things were going well enough, but since on the Internet we can’t have good things for too long, Shelfari was acquired by Amazon, shut down, and subsequently merged with Goodreads. Imagine my disappointment, after patiently uploading and curating data about almost 400 books…

In recalling that disappointment, the terrible feeling of having the rug pulled from under your feet after all that work, I think that a lot of Delicious Library users must feel the same right now, especially early adopters who have been using the app for twenty years, growing their extremely curated library of physical media. So I wrote back to Ding telling him that for these people, having an alternative Web app/service that could replicate most (or all) of Delicious Library’s functions could be nice and a welcome solution.

I also told Ding I would spread the word about his idea, so here I am. What do you think about it? If you’re interested, please go read his blog post, get in touch with him, and share your feedback. If you look at Ding’s past projects (outlined in the post), you’ll realise that he’s perfectly capable of coming up with a good product. And I understand his feelings and uncertainty when he writes, I really want to make this happen—it feels like something I’ve been working toward for years. But I’ve also built so many things that no one wanted before, so I’m not sure if this idea is worth pursuing. — I’ve been there. I know. So the more feedback he receives about this, the better.