I've faced this problem before and the only solution I found to work besides encoding the data was to prepare the statement and specifically bind the data as a blob. So now your code would look like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use Storable qw(freeze thaw);
use DBI "SQL_BLOB";

my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=testlib.db","","",{RaiseErro
+r => 1});

my @books=(
            {
                'ISBN' => '0596004788',
                'Title' => 'Learning Perl Objects, References, and Mod
+ules'
            },
            {
                'ISBN' => '0596001320',
                'Title' => 'Learning Perl, Third Edition'
            },
            {
                'ISBN' => '0596003137',
                'Title' => 'Perl Cookbook, Second Edition'
            },
        );

my $book_list = freeze(\@books);

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO BOOKS (BOOK) values (?)");
$sth->bind_param(1,$book_list,SQL_BLOB);
$sth->execute;
$sth->finish;

$sth = $dbh->prepare( 'select * from BOOKS' );
$sth->execute();
my $book= $sth->fetchrow_array ;

my $new_list = thaw($book);

foreach(@{$new_list}) {
    print "$_->{'ISBN'} $_->{'Title'}\n";
}
__END__
0596004788 Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules
0596001320 Learning Perl, Third Edition
0596003137 Perl Cookbook, Second Edition
[download]

Thank you very much thats exactly what I want to do. I don't think I would have figured that out on my own, everything after the line use strict; are things that I've only learned in the past few hours.

my $book= $sth->fetchrow_array ;
[download]

I think your problem might be because you're calling fetchrow_array in scalar context, which can produce unexpected results. From the docs:

If called in a scalar context for a statement handle that has more than one column, it is undefined whether the driver will return the value of the first column or the last. So don't do that. Also, in a scalar context, an undef is returned if there are no more rows or if an error occurred. That undef can't be distinguished from an undef returned because the first field value was NULL. For these reasons you should exercise some caution if you use fetchrow_array in a scalar context.

To make it list context, do this:

my ( $book ) = $sth->fetchrow_array;
[download]

I thought of that too, but notice that the statement does only return one column. So no, I don't think that's the problem. (also I tested it and it didn't help)

Errm, is there a reason you’re inserting a blob containing a list of hashes into a row – instead of having ISBN and title columns in your books table and putting each of those records in a row? Your code is treating the database as just a file (or a bunch of them). Why not capitalise on the strengths of an RDBMS?

Makeshifts last the longest.

There is a Linux (and Windows, and OS X, and everything else) equivalent of Delicious Library. You want Readerware, which is written in Java and so runs in most places. I've been using it for a couple of years now, and highly recommend it.