Upload your own book covers
Use your own book covers. By popular request, I've added a feature to let users add their own book covers. You can upload covers from your hard drive or by providing a URL.
The feature is available from a book's card, edit or social view. Underneath the present cover there's a link for "change cover image." At present, you can only upload covers to your own books, and the covers remain yours and yours alone. I'm working on the "big project"—user-determined editioning. When I get that working I'll also provide the ability to snag and share covers when appropriate.
Here are some covers I found for books that didn't have any. If you don't have scans, Google is a good way to find them. Often Barnes and Noble or the publisher has a cover when Amazon does not. For now, I've left the feature open for all to use. If people abuse it with non-cover images, I'll have to restrict it to paid members.
Profile improvements. You'll also note that the image-uploading in your profile has been improved. Huge pictures are now shrunk, and a handy "view larger" link. A few photos got lost in the process—my apologies. If this happened to you, please be so kind as to upload the image again.
Review improvements. Reviews are now dated and sorted by date. I'm working on an RSS feed for reviews of books you have.
"Returning to catalog." I changed the way the system handles it when you jump from your catalog into a book. The point is to "keep your place" in the catalog, no matter how many jumps you make between books. The previous system had various bugs. The new one is conceptually much cleaner, but may have some bugs too. Let me know if you find any.
The feature is available from a book's card, edit or social view. Underneath the present cover there's a link for "change cover image." At present, you can only upload covers to your own books, and the covers remain yours and yours alone. I'm working on the "big project"—user-determined editioning. When I get that working I'll also provide the ability to snag and share covers when appropriate.
Here are some covers I found for books that didn't have any. If you don't have scans, Google is a good way to find them. Often Barnes and Noble or the publisher has a cover when Amazon does not. For now, I've left the feature open for all to use. If people abuse it with non-cover images, I'll have to restrict it to paid members.
Profile improvements. You'll also note that the image-uploading in your profile has been improved. Huge pictures are now shrunk, and a handy "view larger" link. A few photos got lost in the process—my apologies. If this happened to you, please be so kind as to upload the image again.
Review improvements. Reviews are now dated and sorted by date. I'm working on an RSS feed for reviews of books you have.
"Returning to catalog." I changed the way the system handles it when you jump from your catalog into a book. The point is to "keep your place" in the catalog, no matter how many jumps you make between books. The previous system had various bugs. The new one is conceptually much cleaner, but may have some bugs too. Let me know if you find any.
posted by Tim at 3:48 AM
39 Comments:
Fantastic - I am really looking forward to updating my library with this feature!
Is the "Random Books from my library" widget no longer meant to work on the profile page? It would be a shame, as I do like this feature, but it has disappeared and no amount of cutting and pasting will get it back !
Sorry. I've spoken of the widgets-in-profile feature a few places, but this is a poor way to disseminate such info.
They are NOT supposed to work. I had to remove them because they were a security risk. (If you can run a JavaScript script you can run a PHP one.) I will add a feature to allow a widget to be added under safer conditions.
Thank you for your patience.
Yay, thank you!
Thank you - I'm sorry to sound persistent (teach me to keep up with the "news") - hadn't realised about the security issue (and can't really pretend I understand it, either!)
If you can make it safer, it would be great. Librarything continues to go from strength to strength.
You, sir, have won the internet.
Image Cover selection is finally here. Yippee. I think it's a lot easier to scan our graphical bookshelf/catalog by image than by text.
Thanks for identifying the widget issue!
this is a poor way to disseminate such info
Yes, it is. So how about a forum or an "Announcements" or "Known issues" page on the site itself?
But now, I'm off to play with the new features!
(Do you ever sleep?)
re: Adding a cover/Grabbing by URL
If the URL changes, will the cover image change as well?
now that we have this BookCover feature, what do you think of having a feature where we can sort our catalog so that we can see only those books without covers?
You are awesome. This is so great. Thanks, Tim! Now I can waste even more time getting my graphical shelf 'just right'.
;)
Here's a bug:
* Go to "Edit book data" with the intention to upload a cover image.
* Update a couple of tags or other fields you notice.
* Click on "change cover image"
The tags or other fields have now lost their changes.
Maybe not exactly a bug but the UI will be better if this doesn't happen.
Infinite thanks, Tim, for implementing the scanned cover books feature. You have made me happy with LibraryThing forever! Thanks!!!!
To sort for books without covers you can start with an ISBN sort (ISBNs determine whether it will look for a cover or not). It's not quite a full solution, however.
Oh my god. The upload your own cover image feature is so hott.
Wow. 323 covers already! The success of this feature really surprises me. I guess I don't care about covers enough!
Oh frabjous day!
Calloo, callay!
I think the book cover idea is great. However, are there any copyright implications? Maybe not. Just wondering.
Very cool feature! It almost prevented me from going out to finish my Giftmas shopping. I'm just happy to get covers for all those B&N books that Amazon doesn't carry. Great job, Tim!
[[To echo lilithcat: really, do you sleep?]]
Here's another small item: I find I can't use the blog widget because, since the author field is very often empty, it generates lots of links like: "My Book Title by (1998)". A simple routine is needed to check whether the author field is empty, and if so, to omit the "by".
Thanks for removing the rectangular border on the user pictures! My oval picture looks a lot better now.
Great to be able to upload covers - or in my case start out by filling in some missing ones from Amazon.com. But I found that many have the new *exciting* 'Look Inside' addition to them. This gives a long link that includes a section like '200_PIlitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,'. A little experimentation shows that if you delete this section then you get the image without the arrow.
An unrelated bug:
On Internet Explorer under Windows XP (at least), selecting to cut and paste is broken in the catalog view. Much more is selected than I want. The only other site I know of with this problem is Collins Word Exchange.
I can't wait to start scanning my old Edgar Rice Burroughs covers into my catalog. Of course I'll have to bring 'em to work to scan. They will look great on the graphical shelf! Oh, the Analog covers will be good as well. And then there's the Ross MacDonald/Lew Archer covers - 25 of them - that I could not find at Amazon. The shelf will look a lot better! I suppose I'll have to reserve a little time for acutal work . . .
Thank you Tim :-)
Here's a weird bug (I've had it happen twice now):
I go to load a cover image from a URL, copy & paste the URL, and submit it: a cover for a totally unrelated book pops up. Clearing the cover and resubmitting the same URL fixes the problem. Is this some strange crosstalk issue if too many people are trying to simultaneously upload cover images?
DarthZeth, I think uploaded cover not linking to Amazon is intended. Why should it?
For covers that are from Amazon, it needs to link back because that's one of the condition in using Amazon API.
Yes, that's the rationale for not linking. But I agree it feels inconsistent. Hmm....
Would it be acceptable to link to photos on other online bookstores if we could also provide a URL that links to that book on that bookstore? Then they would work the same as for Amazon US and the bookstores should be happy for us to use their images since they'd all get the occasional click through.
On a related note, it seems that non-US Amazons can't supply the cover. At least not Amazon Japan. Is that true or was I doing something wrong?
I just wanted to add the "bug report" that I previously e-mailed you into this thread ... a similar issue was noted above ... but I have found that uploading a picture blanks out the "Review" field on the edit form, so that when you submit the changes, you have also ERASED whatever you've had in that field.
Now, my "reviews" are just URLs that point out to my appropriate LiveJournal posts, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to go back in and re-enter those ... but this would be a MAJOR irritation to anybody who had actually written their review in the text box!
Hi anonymous. There was a bug with changing book data (but not the cover) that erased reviews. I lasted about 24 hours. A couple people wrote me about it. If it happened to you (speaking to everyone now) let me know. I can restore it from an old copy.
Thanks for your patience!
Tim:
The feature of uploading one's own book cover or, better yet, borrowing a cover from someone else who uploaded a cover for that same book will be very useful for those folks who want to be able to specify what edition book they own. I have a 1st edition Tom Wolfe book book it seems I'm currently limited to using the cover, and edition, provided by amazon or the library of congress.
Ideally, I would like for my LibraryThing collection to mirror exactly my physical collection.
2 questions:
1. What happned to the discussion regarding "Want to own, currently owned, once read, etc"?
2. When exporting to a csv file how can one get the fields of data to auto format into their own cells. Currently all info about a book goes into a row as a blob of data. I'd like for Title to be in a unique cell compared to Author.
Great, great work. I'm very happy to see all the success you are having.
Happy Holidays,
Tim Post | Brookline | postzavtra@gmail.com
Another suggestion on covers ...
It would be handy, in the "Social Data" tab, to have an option for something along the lines of "see all covers" which would open a screen something like the "graphical shelf" view.
I have a number of books (primarily scifi) for which I've not been able to locate an image for the particular version that I own. While I could set about scanning these various books, I'm betting that others might have already uploaded the right image.
For an example, I have a copy of Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett ... a very popular book on Library Thing, showing up in 176 catalogs. It would, as things curently stand, be quite the hassle to go try to find that book in each of these catalogs just to see what, if any, cover image is associated with it.
Having a single screen (or series of screens if there were more than 20 different covers) would make it MUCH easier to "browse" through already uploaded covers!
thanks!
Dear anonymous (re: seeing all covers for a book at once):
Search all shelves for the title. Then click "see graphical shelf", and bob's your uncle! (Or, if your shelf is set at graphical already, the list will automatically come up with the covers.)
Lilithcat ...
Gee ... that DOES work! Frankly, I'd never had occasion to try the "search" function before (having been concentrating on logging in my library ... I'm about 3/4 done at this point).
I was, however, disappointed to find that out of the 176 copies of Reaper Man, none had the same cover posted as my copy ... so I guess that's one for the scanner!
- BTRIPP
Tim,
In your note on uploading images, you warn against uploading copyright images. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that Amazon has set precedent via a lawsuit that thumbnail images (within a certain size) of book covers do *not* violate copyright. This was mentioned at a copyright seminar I attended once. It would be interesting if a lawyer commented on this.
Good work! Love this feature.
I've encountered another "issue" with the cover upload feature. Initially I uploaded/inked a number of covers for books (which had had none automatically come up when originally entered into my catalog) from various places on the web ... several of these were not the specific cover of MY books, but I figured some edition's cover was better than none on the "graphic shelf".
I have since scanned in many of these covers and have been upset to find that I can't get the system to CHANGE the cover from what I'd previously put in.
In each case I did the "remove it" link from the upload page to get rid of the previously linked-to image, submitted the now-coverless book from the "edit book data" tab, and saw the graphic-less box on the graphic shelf view. However, when I went back into "edit book data", clicked on "change cover image", browsed to the newly scanned book cover graphic and hit upload, every time it simply ressurected the previously deleted image!
Needless to say this is very frustrating, and I've spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out a way to make this work.
Anybody have any clues about why this is not recognizing the newly uploaded graphics, and going back to the image that I've "removed"?
- BTRIPP
Update ...
OK, it seems that one needs to let "removed" uploaded picture stay removed over-night ... I'm assuming that whatever update process is it that changes the numbers in the "Zeitgeist" section ALSO clears out the now-removed previously-updated cover graphics so that there isn't one still associated with that book.
Needless to say, this assumption comes from having given up on trying to upload my new scanned images to try to replace the old web-linked images. I (working on a guess that this might be the case) "removed" all the old images and then came back to it the next day. SURPRISE! Now the new images loaded in just fine without getting ignored in favor of the old images.
It might be a "user friendly" thing to add a note on one of those pages that indicated that if one was changing from an older user-loaded picture to a new user-loaded picture it was going to require removing the old one and waiting until the system updated (overnight?) to be able to sucessfully upload a new one!
- BTRIPP
Would you consider allowing uploads of book spine scans at some point in the future? It would be pretty great to view a shelf that looked like a shelf.
I'd love to do that. It's technically trivial, but would people really do it? There is NO data to draw on.
I'm actually thinking of faking the spines. Use the color of the left edge of the cover. Print the type sideways. It wouldn't be as good as real scans, but it could get the ball rolling.
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