It is a little more manual, but I think the end result is a little faster during use. This half second delay you mention doesn't happen with my library of over

It is a little more manual, but I think the end result is a little faster during use. This half second delay you mention doesn't happen with my library of over a thousand books. If I had something more automatic, I'd still want to be able to use bibtex. I like having the same interface for reading and citing, as well as the same for both reading books and reading papers. I bet there is a command line way to export a bibtex library, so it could be automated in elisp. It takes seconds though, and I only do it a few times a month. Doesn't matter though, I settled on this workflow because I was already using bibtex regularly for papers. Probably makes less sense if you aren't already happy with bibtex.