Importing Delicious Library into LibraryThing

Today I have started evaluating LibraryThing as a possible (more social and webbish) alternative to Delicious Library. In the course of this I attempted to import my books from Delicious Library into LibraryThing as suggested by their import guide, but failed miserably: My books all showed up in my catalog but none of the had their ISBN attached, which resulted in cover images not being loaded etc.

Apparently LibraryThing’s Universal Import feature works by scanning a given file for ISBNs, which are then added to the catalog. In case it cannot find ISBNs, it seems to fall back to some other mechanism for at least extracing title and author information from the given file.

Instead of trying to figure out why LibraryThing was unable to import my data, I came up with a simple solution that exports a Delicious Library into a text-based format that Universal Import can safely consume. Because Delicious Library uses XML to store its catalog, one can throw basically any programming language with XML support at the problem. I went for PHP today, because it has a nice object-oriented interface to Delicious Library (maintained by yours truly):

<?php
/* Use this script to convert the Delicious Library data to a format that
 * can safely be imported into LibraryThing.  Contrary to the documentation,
 * LT does not support importing Delicious Library directly.
 *
 * Usage: $ php dl-to-lt.php > export.txt
 *
 * Use export.txt in the Universal Importer thing.
 */
require_once "File/DeliciousLibrary.php";

$library = new File_DeliciousLibrary("/Users/martin/Library/Application Support/Delicious Library/Library Media Data.xml");

try {
    $library->parse();

    foreach ($library->getBooks() as $book) {
        if (empty($book->asin)) {
            fwrite(STDERR, "Unable to export book \"" . $book->title . "\" because ISBN is missing.\n");
            continue;
        }

        echo $book->asin . "\n";
    }
} catch (File_DeliciousLibrary_Exception $e) {
    die("Uh oh, something went wrong. Go figure: " . $e->getMessage() . "\n");
}

Works For Me^[tm].