Apple certainly was inspired by the look of Delicious Library but I’m not upset to have influenced them. For me the whole point of UI design is to move the state of the art forward for everyone. I’d be disappointed if Apple didn’t take my interface and use it, it’d mean Mike and I kind of failed.

I mean, I didn’t invent the push-button, but I use it everywhere in my apps, as we all do. Someone, somewhere invented it first, and I thank them.

That is a mature and selfless viewpoint, and I'm impressed. I was a user of Delicious Library at the time, and I couldn't believe my eyes when iBooks showed up in the keynote. I haven't used a mac in a long time, but that example of an egregious lifting of a design aesthetic has always stuck with me.

Thank you for your years of sitting in a Starbucks with your friends to make what was a beautiful and useful app. I don't use macs anymore, or else I would still be a happy customer.

It is of course certain someone at Apple had seen Delicious Library, and likely one of the people who had seen that design were involved in the original iBooks. But there is no functionality overlap with Delicious Library - DL was about cataloging media and managing loans, not accessing digital media itself. I was not able to add a digital book or movie to DL, nor could I make a reference to a physical book or movie I own in iBooks.

But its also not like there were that many skeuomorphic UIs for managing books. Actually two - a bookshelf showing spines, and one showing fronts. And if you are going to maintain a picture of the front, you're probably going to want to show it by default.

It’s odd literally no apps that we’ve ever seen did the front view before we did it in November 2004. I think it required a large database of front covers before anyone thought of it — before Amazon came along there’d be no decent way to get the covers to display.