Saturday, September 24, 2005

Shelf view

You can now switch to seeing your book covers displayed side-by-side together as if they were on a shelf. (On a shelf facing out, which no book-lover would do!) Check it out.

Some notes:
  • This post was originally a request for QA help. I think all the errors can be traced to something which is now fixed. Before reporting an error, quit out of your browser and come back in. The "stylesheets" in your cache may be old.
  • If you report an error, also tell me you browser and OS. If you're feeling generous, also give me a screenshot.
  • I will look into ways users can contribute cover images. I'm worried about it from storage, security and spamming angles. I might add such a feature, but restrict it to external URLs at established booksellers and publishers.
  • The effect is something like what Delicious Library does, although Delicious Library improves Amazon's images and puts them on a photo-realistic shelf. (Rectangles floating in space is about all I can handle right now!) For what it's worth, I didn't steal the feature from DL. I doubt he patented it, but I've got prior year prior art from an eBook project I worked on at my former employer, Houghton Mifflin.

28 Comments:

Blogger Anthony Kendall said...

It works great using Safari on OS 10.4! One thought, now that the book covers are being featured so prominently, it would be nice to be able to upload images of the covers, or link to them from another site in case the proper cover image did not come up from the LoC or Amazon.

9/24/2005 9:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, it works for me using Safari 2.0.1 and OS 10.4.2. I'm really impressed that the Japanese books I entered are also displaying their titles nicely with this.

Thanks so much, Tim!
Sara

9/24/2005 10:16 AM  
Blogger Tim Challies said...

Looks good in FF 1.0.6 on Windows XP. It also looks fine in IE6.

I might suggest you put some type of visual clue that clicking on a title will reveal more information. A mouseover icon or perhaps a border on mouseover might let people know the covers are clickable...

9/24/2005 10:18 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Can see them clearly with Firefox 1.0.7 (Windows XP) but they are not clickable. Can see them and click them with IE. I second Anthony Kendall's request for the ability to import book covers from other than Amazon.

9/24/2005 10:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Looks great on this end (firefox 1.0.7) I agree with other comments that it would be helpful to be able to add a picture. Or is there some way to combine the LC and Amazon results into one record- for many Amazon has pics but the LC has the complete card catalog info that I love.

9/24/2005 10:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Visible and clickable for me when running Firefox 1.07 on Windows XP (so not sure what theraven's problem might be). I also think a mouseover thingy would be cool. Could you get the 20 covers to show in 4 rows of 5? It just looks a bit uneven as is (a minor gripe). What happens if there's no cover image?

9/24/2005 10:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's probably not supposed to do that... (Opera 7, Win)

9/24/2005 11:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Works fine under Safari 1.3.1, Mac OS 10.3.9.

Thanks!!
Owen Strawn

9/24/2005 11:28 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This may be related to some of the work you're doing, but my library has suddenly stopped showing book covers in the list format, regardless of which the display option settings...

9/24/2005 11:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

(ignore the word "which" in that last comment: guess who clicked "Publish" when he meant to click "Preview"...)

9/24/2005 11:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, I like this one. Works fine for me in FF 1.0.6 and IE6 in Win Xp. I thought clicking on the covers to see what would happen was pretty obvious, but that might just be me. All the links inside worked, on both browsers. Even checked to see how it works after a search... definitely like it.

Now I just need a way to fill in all the blank spaces... there's a lot of my books that there just isn't going to be a cover available online anywhere... some it's hard to find even the title online at all. Even if hosting the images isn't realistic (though that would make them available for anyone to use, wouldn't it?) since I bet that would get huge after a while, a way to link to our own images might be something else to think about... and a lot of my covers are already scanned. (Craft books--- it's amazing how many of these, even fairly recent ones, don't even have any sort of ISBN.)

Last night, I manually entered a whole series of children's books... though they have ISBNs on them, they simply would not work. Think it was the numbers, not LibraryThing, because LibraryThing was behaving itself with everything else. Puzzling.

9/24/2005 11:56 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love this feature! And I second what Anthony Kendall said. :D

9/24/2005 12:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Also broken in the latest Opera build - 8.5/Win

The books without images associated aren't showing up text substitutes, and clicking on a book brings the link box up at the bottom of the page, 100% width, instead of over the book's image.

Looks good in IE 6.02/Win, though.

9/24/2005 12:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hmm. It is now working in Opera 8.5/Win. Deepest apologies for the false report.

9/24/2005 12:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Looks great here (Netscape7)! It's been the nudge I need to delete some erroneous editions and add the right ones, which is good. I'd like to be able to merge records, though, instead of having to copy comments, tags, LC data etc across to the right one... :)

And the ability to manually add cover art would be wonderful. A couple of titles have images on Amazon.co.uk that don't show up here, for some reason.

9/24/2005 1:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

works for me! browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

9/24/2005 2:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It seems to be working, but I am curious what order they're being sorted in, since it doesn't seem to be title, author, or date-added.

9/24/2005 3:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Also works well in IE 6.0.2600 on winXP. It sorts in whatever order your list was most recently sorted in.

9/24/2005 3:40 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Works in IE 6 and Firefox 1.07. Very cool! Keep it up!

9/24/2005 4:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for adding another fun feature. Now if I could just get broad band where I live so the images could load faster.

9/24/2005 5:52 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

About sorting: The "shelf view" sorts the same as the list view. So, however you were sorting in the list view it sorts in the shelf view. You can also browse tags in list view, search by title, etc.

I'll be working to expose this functionality more within the view itself, but I just wanted to let you know what's possible.

9/24/2005 5:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Slightly off topic here but on sorting: Is there any way we can do a more advanced sort- such as sort by author, then by pub date or title within each author, etc?

Better and Better...

9/24/2005 6:08 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That is just cool

9/24/2005 7:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This really is quite spiffy :) Thanks for making so many changes!

9/25/2005 1:06 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi,

I'm reporting a problem, actually, with my virutal shelf. I can't find a place to report problems, so I hope this is it! (I'm an idiot at computers, and am using a computer that's not in English, to boot, so your site is brilliant for me - so easy an English major can use it!)

The thing is that when I entered a certain book in my library - 'Holding Up a Mirror' by Anne Glyn-Jones, I got the title of the book right, but the little picture is for a book called 'ROAM' (I guess -that's what's on the cover) and it seems to be about computers or something. At the moment, the titles aren't displaying so I can't tell if my list shows the correct title or not (it was the correct title, but wrong picture when I clicked on the book that came up after I searched.) I do love looking at the covers of my books! But that's not one of my books! So now what?

9/26/2005 6:56 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I want to add my thanks for this sight and feature. I also wanted to second anthony kendall's suggestion since I have several books with no cover images in LoC or Amazon, but the publisher's own site features them. I will be glad to give url's if this will help. Thank you again for conceiving and putting in all the work for this site. I also want to let you know that I found this site from Evangelical Outpost, in case you are tracking these.

9/26/2005 5:37 PM  
Blogger moirae said...

For people's own "cover art" I think there might be some copyright issues involved with scanning a cover and putting it on the net. I agree that inserting a link to an external site would work well. Maybe someday someone will build the great database of book cover art the way Wizards of the Coast built their incredible database of magic cards.

9/27/2005 1:25 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A couple of little things I've noticed today:
- Either there is a user with a username of "" or there's a little display bug in the list of users that sometimes the first one's name doesn't get displayed. For instance, at http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?book=108194 on the social tab, the first user, and on http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=alasen the first user who shares 60 books with Alasen.

- On the social view of tags of a book, there's an &mdash in the listings that needs a semicolon so it actually displays.

Loving the service!

--Joel

9/28/2005 11:24 AM  

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