Help out with default covers!
LibraryThing now shows a special blank cover whenever a book lacks one.We think we can do it better. We'd love members to be able to pick a different cover, and even different default covers for different books. For example, I'd love to have a default cover for the Loeb Classical Library's Latin (red) and Greek (green) books.
So, let's open it up. LibraryThing members have time and again shown they take better pictures than us. So let's have a contest!
UPDATE: Two people sent in some very slick covers, in a rainbow of colors. I think they're pretty cool. Check them out below. I also set up a wiki page for the contest.
What do to: Take a photo of your favorite, probably old book. Make sure you take it from directly above and the image is clear.
The image. Quality is key. The image need to be large and clear. You don't need to Photoshop it yourself—slicing it out of background and removing the title, if there is one—but it has to be doable. Shadows are killer.
The rules. We'll give out three-to-five free accounts, but we reserve the right to use any image submitted. All images will be credited on the page where you choose them, if you want it.
Sent today!:
Current page:
Google's default covers:
Labels: book covers, contest, covers
posted by Tim at 11:52 AM
27 Comments:
You ask for good images, but does that mean that the covers themselves have to be pristine? Sometimes a worn book has more resonance.
I'm a little confused -- could you post more details on what you're looking for? Images (e.g. of landscapes) that could be used on book covers, or images of actual book covers? If the latter, won't we be running into copyright issues by using them?
Re: Good image/worn images. Very true. The image needs to be sharp. The cover can be as worn and interesting as you want, so long as there's a somewhat blank area somewhere to add words over.
Re: We're looking for images of book covers like the one shown, or the Google ones. You could do it with a very plain modern cover that could have everything "distinctive" erased, but the model is an old cover where you're basically showing the material, not the cover. Design elements like a gold line are not copyrightable.
Thank you for creating these covers in the first place. I think they look great, certainly better than text in a box. However you finally end up changing things up, it'll be a step in the right direction.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to choose from a menu of many different colors for the place-holder, so I could match the covers of my many jacket-less books. I buy a lot of second-hand books, and they often lack the dust-jacket.
I do like your current placeholder though - it's much better than the beige rectangle!
I like the plain-ish book cover that somebody has uploaded for most of the Agatha Christie novels, featuring a lady in a broad-brimmed hat and some illegible gold writing. That was a nice alternative for some of our old Agathas when I couldn't find a cover match. It would do for a lot of historical novels by female writers or featuring female characters.
Is there a way to turn off the default cover feature altogether? As somebody with a lot of obscure books, these default covers kind of overwhelm the real ones in my library. Thanks.
I would like to second the anonymous above - could you make "no covers" an option? I prefer that look and a blank is not so hard on the eyes when I'm trying to see what covers need uploading.
And this is slightly off-topic, but would it be possible to indicate on the work or 'change-cover' page which user owns a particular cover? Often I find myself curious about the cover-owner but faced with the impossible task of plowing through hundreds of users to locate him/her. That would be an awesome feature for the diligent cover-uploaders among us who may be interested in a specific edition of a book that is not easily distinguished otherwise.
Many thanks.
You say to "submit today," but where to?
-- AnnaClaire
Where are we supposed to send them? I have a great, brown leather vintage book cover that might work.
LT UserID cckelly
So do I. Since my previous comment, I thought of trying to upload my prelims to WikiThing, but can't get the file small enough.
How 'bout this: if we don't get told how to enter, we'll all whine about how it wasn't a fair fight! ;)
-- AnnaClaire
Email your covers to Tim - he'll put them up (tim@librarything.com)
But I wanted to post them as an invitation to people with better photo editing software than I have, and are reasonably skilled at using it(I was/am perfectly happy to offer to split the credit). Posting the picture means they'd know what they're getting into. E-mailing the file to Tim just means more work for Tim.
-- AnnaClaire
Like two earlier anonymous comments, I don't like default covers and would really like to be able to turn this feature off. Is this going to be enabled?
Well, there has to be SOME default cover image. But if you want the previous plain square, we can do that. Is that what you mean?
Yes. That is, we would like a "no default covers" option - just a blank. (Like before default covers were introduced.)
Yes, as anonymous has just said - a blank, as before.
I'd like the option to select a theme for my library, if that's programatically possible. Kudos to all who have submitted covers thus far---the current entries are outstanding!
I really like the plain Penguin cover - to be most useful it would need options in orange, green and red as well. And the completely plain covers in a range of colours do mean that you can match the cover of your (sadly) dustjacketless book.
I'd also agree with the request to be able to just have the old plain square, for those with a lot of old books, although I like the new image myself.
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I like the ones from TheAshLad3 (especially the last one) and "What the Dickens" from Greyhead.
I don't know if this thing is still open for entries, but I wanted to give it a go as well... I took greyhead's excellent scan of the Dickens cover and made it into a lighter version, to match with the light brown site design. That way, it might be easier to distinguish between default covers and "real" covers in the catalog view.
However, I have no idea how to add my image to the wiki page! Should I just e-mail it instead?
Hi. I've had a couple of books where book data has been found on Amazon, but doesn't match the cover I actually have. Maybe the publisher has changed the cover between printings.
So, I would find useful an option on "change cover" to select "default cover" even though I already have a cover selected.
Since you're presumably going to be changing the code to allow users to select between the different default covers you settle on here, I thought it worth suggesting in this thread. Sorry if it's off-topic.
A similar request: I have entered all my books by ISBN, so for me the fact that selecting a cover from Amazon changes the ISBN for my book is a misfeature. There can be multiple editions with identical covers, and I can't tell from the "change cover" page which are going to break my ISBN. In some cases, the only match for my cover has broken the ISBN. So it would be useful to be able to select an Amazon cover without changing ISBN (and/or to change the ISBN without LT trying to "update" my selected cover).
Thanks for the note. I agree. Both are planned features.
Regarding covers and ISBNs, unfortunately it's not a 1-to-1 thing. ISBNs have to change when you change contents, but publishers can change covers all they want.
I had no idea that selecting a cover that someone else had loaded or was already in the system affected the ISBN of one's entry in any way. That's really alarming. There should be a pop-up warning that says: Changing to this cover will change your ISBN (or similar). I would rather leave it with no image or go to the trouble of scanning my own cover than distort the data of an entry.
But my real question, that I'm hoping someone will be able to answer: how do I change my default cover from the standard brown one? There are few amongst the new "blank" covers that I like a lot, and I'd like to be able to use one of these as my default. Haven't been able to find out where to change that setting though.
What is the best pixel size to use? (LxW) I'd like to try to make a few. Thanks in advance.
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