You are what you read
We've always pushed the idea that your books are you. Well, now you can see yourself on a single page.We were inspired by two very cool projects: LibraryThing author David Louis Edelman's post about creating photo mosaics of himself from his book covers, and a post by Adam of Tailors Today about creating a poster of every book he's ever read.
In both cases, one of the challenges was dealing with LibraryThing's 100-cover limit in "Cover view." So we made a special nothing-but-the-covers page.
The new page doesn't replace the "Cover view" in your catalog (which remains the easiest way to visually browse your library), but book cover arts and crafts projects like this will be a little easier with everything consolidated in one place.
Check it out, discuss it here and let us know if you do anything as cool as David and Adam.
posted by john at 4:09 PM
36 Comments:
How do you access the "nothing but the covers" page?
(head in hands)
http://www.librarything.com/allyourcovers.php
Yeah, I added that.
I added my link-comment after seeing your head-in-hands comment but before seeing the new link in your post.
Tim, this is great. Thanks for adding this feature.
I wish we could make it easier still. Alas, it looks like that mosaic software can't run off a server. And, since it took quite some time to generate something good running on John's top-of-the-line MacbookPro, we'd need a render farm to do it for everyone.
I wonder if the larger-size Amazon covers would help some posterites? Any other cool ideas? (I have one I'm not telling about. I want to check with a guy first.)
We should I agree. But I wouldn't say our "core competencies" include t-shirt making. If some enterprising t-shirt maker wants to team up with us, we'd be happy. We could easily figure out how to generate a nice, direct-to-plate PDF.
I see the matrix!
I guess wordie people could have all of the words they entered put into a machine generated story.
What do ya think, John?
Yeah, there's gotta be a Wordie angle in here someplace. Would be easier, in some ways: words scale better. Vector graphics. Easier to put on posters :-)
Reminds me of Alexandra Samuel's very cool post about putting her del.icio.us tag cloud on her MacBook.
Guys, this is great. But of course, since I'm never satisfied… do you know what would be even greater? If you could package this into some kind of utility for libraries. Then I, as a public librarian, could scan new books as we purchase them into our LibraryThing account, and display the all-covers view on (or link to from) my library's homepage. My patrons would get to see our new books in a format way better than our catalog can produce, and I'd look like a superhero. The catch would be that clicking on the cover would link to the book's record in our catalog. Any interest in such an application?
john - I so want my LT tag cloud plastered on the front of my computer.
herzogbr - you could use the widget to display new book covers on your library website (see the sidebar of this blog for Tim's all-covers blog widget), but I'm not sure we can make the links go to your catalog instead of Amazon. (Amazon's TOS say we by using the covers, we must link back to them). Widgets made specifically for library websites and catalogs are on the drawing board though, so we'll be giving you something cool to play with soon.
Thanks Abby. I hadn't noticed LT's widget before - it's neat. I think I'll add it to my own website, but you're right in that it's not quite there yet for public library use (especially since my director's husband owns an independent bookstore, and so is morally opposed to all things Amazon). But if you could rollout something with custom and LT links, instead of Amazon and LT links, I'll volunteer to be your beta library.
herzogbr - you could also do a widget without covers, then the text links just go back to LT...
Abby - I understand the situation with Amazon's TOS requiring that their covers lead to their site. But many of us scan in covers, especially when they aren't available elsewhere. Is it possible to have those lead to the Book Info page?
I've shamelessly copied this idea, generating both a portrait, and a mosaic of my favourite book. I've added a tutorial to my blog, with some tips for using AndreaMosaic with book covers (including ensuring that the books are the right way up), and removing unwanted images. The tutorial shows my finished pictures, too.
While I'm here, can I repeat an earlier request, but with a new twist. How about a page that lists all of my books without a cover, but where other covers are available. They may be user uploaded covers, or perhaps covers that have come from an alternative Amazon website (eg Amazon UK). All the books could then display on one page, and I could just click on any covers I recognise.
I need to do a FAQ "Why can't LibraryThing tell me what books DON'T have covers?" It's hard, actually, since we don't "know." We just get what Amazon has. Sometime Amazon returns a blank image, but it's all the same as far as the request.
Tim
Would it be possible for LibraryThing to check which "covers" it gets from amazon are 0 K and which are > 0 K?
The "wordie" aspect reminds me of this year's Oscars poster, quoting famous screen dialogue:
http://www.oscars.org/publications/poster79/index.html
Also -- thanks, Mark Barnes, your tutorial is terrific.
I love this feature. I'm a retired librarian, and boy is Herzogbr right about how well this would go over with the patrons. Would it be possible to filter by anything other than tags? It would be cool to collect only covers from specific authors, for example, or with a particular word in the title. Just a thought.
I totally love both the All your covers on one page! and Put LibraryThing on your blog features.
I really love you guys.
OMG. I so got sucked into this and had to create a mosaic for my profile page. Shame on you for tempting me with more time-wasting book-related foolishness! ;)
I did two photomosaics the day after you mentioned this waaaay back in Jan/Feb but I must have forgotten to add them to your blog. They were two of my most viewed Flickr pix of the year.
There's a self-portrait and a library made of books.
Thanks for making such things possible.
Excellent. I saw those. I'm surprised they didn't make it in. Cool stuff.
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Well, I'm like way behind the pack ;), but after finding time to finally add all my books to librarything, I did a mosaic of one of my favorite pictures :)
Has something changed? Previously I could see all my covers but now the scanned-in ones are displaying as the default "No Cover Available". And I have a lot of self-scanned covers! Help!
@billfl
If you click on the covers that are showing blank and check out the edit screen for those books, you'll likely find there's no ISBN info there. As far as I can tell, the "all your covers" page searches for covers that match the ISBNs in your book list; it doesn't just grab them from your uploaded or chosen covers. (Which would also explain why many of mine are showing the wrong covers - what with the number of errors in the information provided by many of the sites on the "add books" page in response to barcode readings. Barcodes =/= ISBNs! (Particularly with massmarket pbs.)
If the above is true, this does mean that the "all your covers" page can also be used to quickly see which of your books have erroneous or absent ISBN info, if that's something you feel like fixing. Of course, some old books don't have ISBNs at all so they'll always show as blanks on the "all your covers" page.
It would be nice if I could get the all covers page to pick from three choices: all covers (current approach), only non-default covers, only default covers.
@harlequinella ...
I'm having the same problem as billfl, lots of default covers. When I click on a random half dozen, they all do indeed have ISBNs. So do you have any other theories about this issue? It's a beautiful thing, this 'all my covers', but I'm not wanting to do anything with it when it has all these 'blank' covers in it.
I like the title of your article, this is practically true. What you read is what interest you most.
Yeah, I’m getting the same thing as sunny.
I'm attracted with your ideas here. I believe so, a personality can be reflected on what he's reading.
Is it possible to create a cover mosaic with covers that aren't in your library but are instead the result of a tag search?
Are there any legal issues involved with the photo-mosaic portraits, i.e. permission form publishers, etc.? Did you need to get permission to use them, and what about use on t-shirts?
[Blogger Tim said...
We should I agree. But I wouldn't say our "core competencies" include t-shirt making. If some enterprising t-shirt maker wants to team up with us, we'd be happy. We could easily figure out how to generate a nice, direct-to-plate PDF. 1/31/2007 8:35 PM]
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