All your covers

In the last day, LibraryThing's incoming traffic has nearly doubled from one source, a blog post about a guy who made a poster of every book he's ever read. Then LibraryThing author David Louis Edelman did a post about using his covers to make photomosaics.

The big problem for both was getting all the covers together, fighting against the "Cover views" maximum of 100. So, taking a short break ffrom relentless database optimizations, we made a page with JUST covers—no other functionality. It's available member-by-member at:

http://www.librarything.com/allyourcovers.php

We decided not to let people see others' pages, because there are LT users with 10,000 books, and everyone will want to see those and Amazon will send us angry letters about all the bandwidth we're using.

Check it out and let us know what you want changed. We're writing up the blog post now, with all the URLs.

Very nice :-D

Do you see a possibility to add a 'find your books without covers' here? I'm sure it would boost upload of scanned pictures...

Cool . . . and it was already possible here are my first 1000 covers from a week or two ago - shrunk just a bit.

Lovely - I particularly like being able to filter by tag.

Spoke too soon- when I filter by the tag "law", I also get books tagged "Lawrence Durrell".

Can this be fixed?

Very nice, but I'd like to be able to click through to the book or cover edit page - this is a fabulous way of spotting incorrect covers, much easier than the catalogue view (for me, anyway).

It's taking a long time to load the whole thing, but filtering by tag is a fabulous idea!

Blog post:

http://www.librarything.com/blog/2007/01/you-are-what-you-read.php

I don't usually care much about covers (except for having the right one for my copy), but this is VERY cool! Thanks, Tim, and yes, filtering by tags is great.

Wonderful. I too would like a "your books without covers" list, and also a "your books which are using amazon covers" list.

Currently the covers on that page all link to Amazon, even for covers I uploaded myself. Actually, the links are all the same - it looks broken, so you're probably working on it.

Seeing all my book covers on a single page is so cool -- and I can't even tell you why! I just want to stare at it.

> when I filter by the tag "law", I also get books tagged "Lawrence Durrell".

Try "law," (with a comma after the tag) - it won't find the books where 'law' is the last tag, though.

>11

I'd like to have a complete solution, rather than a partial one. "law," gets me fewer books. And, of course, that won't be the only tag with this issue ("crafts", for example, also brings up "arts and crafts movement").

I suppose I could get in the habit of adding a comma after the last tag, but that offends my sense of order!

That's very odd. When I search my tags for
{space} Java {space}
on the Search page, I get Java books but no JavaScript books. But that same search won't work on the covers page. So much for that workaround.

I love the covers page anyway.

Yeah, it works differently. But the page was designed for craft projects, mostly. For that, I don't see a complex tag syntax being big. But maybe it's exposing a deeper need for cover-based display.

I do think craft projects would like to be able to (correctly) limit the covers to one tag, now you offer 'Filter by a tag:' in the first place.

It wouldn't have to be complex, a radio button for 'exact match' would do.

Alternatively: allow a 'drill through' the other way around: people do their search on their catalog and then have a button "covers only", for example next to 'cover view'.

Or: _within_ the existing 'cover view' (in 'Your library') allow to limit to 'only books with cover' / 'only books without cover'.
Maybe as 'miscellaneous powers' in the power edit?

We are a spoilt bunch of users ;-)

Really neat, Tim! Aside from agreeing with what others have said here, I like the idea on the blog of being able to get a view in random order.

A t-shirt? Wow! How many covers would fit, I wonder? If someone else makes them, it still oughta have the LT logo. :-)

Tim, can't you reuse the tag-filter code from the normal library?

Not to complain, but is this why I can't search for the correct book cover for a new book that I am trying to add this morning?

Most likely, we have a new page but several of the old pages now seem to be broken.

I created a "photo" of the covers of the books read so far in 2007, and also came across a broken page. I didn't have a cover yet for one of the books and decided to put a "stand-in" cover as "my" cover. Didn't work. When I click on "Change book Cover" I get a blank screen.

>20

Cf. i.a. Bug Collectors : Warning message while trying to upload book cover image & no user provided cover shown.

21:

Thanks for the link. I get the blank page, and nothing else, no LT bars.

I've taken this method and used it to create a picture of my favourite book (Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper. See my blog post: http://www.4-14.org.uk/index.php/archives/72-you-are-what-you-read or Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/markbarnes/377467639/

The blog contains a few useful hints that might save a few people some time.

Perhaps LibraryThing could partner with Qoop, who could print the posters automatically from your LibraryThing account.

Thanks to markbarnes for the blog post - I couldn't resist playing this morning and tried to make an LT logo, I go the settings a bit wrong but ended up with this version.
which has 15,000 tiles (from 3,344 covers in my library). You can see the whole image by clicking here - warning it's big (about 32Mb)! Here's a little corner reduced a bit.

Umm not to be a killjoy here but isn't this repackaging amazon's data?

Probably stupid questions, but I know nothing about the law here, so need to ask:

Who owns the rights to the image of a book cover?

If it is the person who scans the image, does Amazon acquire the rights to images uploaded by sellers? Does E-bay?

According to this Amazon doesn't directly claim copyright over images. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Images_from_Amazon.com#Response_from... Amazon claims the publisher still holds copyright. They would apparently also for user scanned covers which opens a whole new can of worms.

The publisher does hold the copyright. The problem lies (or may lie, I don't know) in Amazon's Terms of Service, by which this site is permitted to link to Amazon. Since Tim has blogged about this use of images, presumably he has considered this issue and determined that it's not a problem.

Does this (Lilithcat #29) apply where the cover is (for example) an art image. I've scanned and uploaded a good number of covers and had no moral hesitation where it is obviously a publisher commissioned image. I take the line I am doing them a favour by publicising their book. But say the cover is a painting from a famous artist - the publisher must have had permission to use the image (perhaps at a price), but whoever owns those rights (museum, art gallery etc) may have different ideas about me using them. I would guess permission would be granted to the publishers to use the image but that would not be the same as a transfer of ownership/copyright. I think they would be fairly petty to object in the LT context but they might say it opens a can of beans. For example I have a book on the artist Balthus and the cover image is a detail from "Le Chat au Miroir III". The publishers have overlaid with with title, author, publisher but those changes will not have made it 'their' image. And I'm not sure that in cases like this that the issue is to to do with copyright. I am fairly sure that the Louvre can restrict publication of the Mona Lisa image but perhaps this is because they own the picture rather than the copyright. Perhaps someone more conversant in this area of law can elucidate.

#30

Been looking at copyright law web sites. I did find a case about art used on the book cover. But it was a case in which the publisher had not had permission to use the work of art, and then someone else had reproduced the cover. More fun, this stuff. :-) If you google: copyright image "book cover" art, you ought to turn up some info.

I've also learned, from a government web site, that I may be violating the rights of the heirs of some deceased photographers by copying my old family pictures. Well ... they'll just have to sue me.

they'll just have to sue me.

Let's just remember that if we post something here in violation of copyright, we won't be sued. Tim will. Not a very nice way to repay his hard work. For that reason, I err on the side of caution in these matters.

lilithcat,

I have absolutely no intention of posting my old family pictures on LibraryThing.

Edited to add: Not that I'm hiding the ancestors. :-) They're on ancientfaces.

This is extremely cool. Thanks, Tim.

As for copyright, I would assume that because of fair use laws, each user having one copy of the covers of the books in their own library should be okay. I'm also guessing this is why Tim only gave each user access to the covers in her own library.

(Fair use - as long as you're only using a few copies for personal reasons, with no financial gain, you should be okay. At least that's the way the law works with hard-copy items, including photos and other art. Once we get to the internet, I'm a bit less sure.)

Message 31: myshelves -- I've also learned, from a government web site, that I may be violating the rights of the heirs of some deceased photographers by copying my old family pictures. Well ... they'll just have to sue me.

I learned that too after my mother died and we tried to make copies of old photos for family members. My mother was 97 when she died so I daresay the photographers were long dead but try convincing a photocopy place of that.

My mother-in-law died last November (just after her 100th birthday) and I scanned in a bunch of her old photographs and made a book using myPublisher. Most of the photos were family snaps but a few portraits had the original photographer's name on them. I Googled them in an odd moment but they seem to be lost without trace.

Any work created before 1923 is no longer copyright in the U.S. Pretty much any work created before 1900 is not copyright anywhere. (There may be minor exceptions, IANAL.)

A substantially exact reproduction of a public-domain work is also public domain, so that book cover with the Mona Lisa is not copyrught, unless they've modified the image enough to claim copyright for a new work.

I had no difficulties in getting old photos cleaned up and new negatives made when I first got my hands on old family photos. But to me, post-1923 photos are the new ones. :-)

A thought just struck me. If you used your yearbook photo on your profile page, could the yearbook photographer (or publisher, if he got the rights) sue? Surely fair use?

I am fairly sure that the Louvre can restrict publication of the Mona Lisa image but perhaps this is because they own the picture rather than the copyright. Perhaps someone more conversant in this area of law can elucidate.

IANAL, but the copyright for the Mona Lisa is in the public domain. You are mostly correct in that the Louvre controls access to the original painting, meaning they can charge fees for new copies of the painting and they can also place licensing restrictions around the use of those images. The catch is that those restrictions only apply to the person agreeing to them.

The Louvre does claim to hold the copyright to the *photograph* of the Mona Lisa on their Web site, but that's a different issue, and most people seem to agree that a straight photograph or scan of an existing image does not constitute a new work subject to new copyright. But again, I'm not a lawyer.

I was there - in the Louvre - a couple of weeks ago and they have big signs banning photography in the Gallery where the Mona Lisa is (we didn't go in this time but did pass the gallery doorway). Mind you it's not easy to see - the room was packed with people and the painting itself is small and hidden behind bullet proof glass.

I guess that all goes to preserve the image copyright.

Hi, a little late to the conversation, but wanted to say, GreyHead, that logo mosaic is awesome! I tried to do the exact same thing (thought it would be cute to have a mosaic logo for the 'all your covers' page), but all my attempts were either too low-res and therefore illegible, or, if I upped the resolution, looked more like pointilist paintings than mosaics.

As to the Amazon TOS, we discussed that, and we're in compliance -- notice that each cover on that page does indeed link back to Amazon.

As I understand it, publishers own the rights to their own covers, but fair use covers the use of such images by LibraryThing. Amazon, though, owns the rights to their specific scans, and that's what their TOS covers.

39 & 41

Interesting.

"Most people seem to agree that a straight photograph or scan of an existing image does not constitute a new work subject to new copyright."

If those people are correct, and it applies to Mona Lisa, what rights would someone have in a scan of a book cover?

All of this sounds like the good old "Rule Against Perpetuities." A court refused to find a lawyer negligent for violating the Rule in drafting a document, on the grounds that no one understood it. :-)

> 41 :JohnMcGrath : Thank you.

There does seem to be a real trade off between resolution, the size of the image and the number of source images. That one ended up so big because I rotated the source logo to get the images right way up and forgot to reset the image tile count. My previous side-ways version was much cruder.

I read the AndreasMosaic manual last night and he says that he prefers low tile count mosaics but to get good ones you need a very big image library to get reasonably good matches for the tiles.

I'll try and tweak the settings a bit more tomorrow and see if it's possible to create on that looks OK and is a reasonable size.

GreyHead--it probably also has to do with the cumulative damage of millions of flashbulbs going off over a period of decades. Even if they weren't worried about the copies, they'd still want to protect the canvas.

Myshelves--If those people are correct, and it applies to Mona Lisa, what rights would someone have in a scan of a book cover?

That's a very good question. A lawyer would probably say "it depends." And I think it partially depends on the size of the scan, partially on the manipulation of the image, and so on. As long as you use common sense and are courteous to others I think you'll be okay.

Message 38: myshelves -- Ha, ha. If the yearbook publisher of my high school yearbook wants to sue me, I'll gladly pay him anything to keep my picture out of anybody's hands in perpetuity. Before my kids knew my maiden name, even they couldn't recognize me.

Message 42: myshelves -- A court refused to find a lawyer negligent for violating the Rule in drafting a document, on the grounds that no one understood it

Don't you just hate it when they try to get lawyers to use "plain English"? What do they think we went to law school for?

I've never understood what was so difficult about the Rule Against Perpetuities. ~mumblety-mumble~ years after law school, never practising property law, and I can still remember: "No interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, within a life in being at the creation of the interest, plus twenty-one years thereafter." Pretty clear. It's the application of the Rule that can get convoluted. Remember the "fertile octogenarian"?

Sorry for the hijack . . .
;-)

Does this mean we get to have mosaic contests along with the book pile contests?

http://www.librarything.com/allyourcovers.php is great but, if I Click on the cover image.. it takes it to amazon.com instead can I change that to take me to LibraryThing book link (i.e. review,..) ???

thanks

49 (Iamyuva) : See Message 41. It's part of the Amazon Terms of Service.

>50

Still, I do not understand why e.g. all of my covers are linking at Amazon's.

I think it's called coding on the fly. The page was put up in a rush and they probably just applied the same ISBN-based link to every picture - just a guess as my all covers page takes too long to load to go and look.

>52

ISBN ? Quite difficult, Methinks, at least with my collection, for most of my books are pre-ISBN era. Of course, my question remains.

Thanks to this thread, I just realized that "All My covers" is really "covers for all my books" -- because I have a lot of books that have covers different from the Amazon ones.

Without knowing much about computer coding, my guess is that my copy links to the work, and the work may have an ISBN for later editions, and this is what Amazon gets -- i.e., the same cover for everyone who has the work, regardless of the individual copy.

> 51

boekerij, I didn't code the page, so I can't speak with certainty. But on my "All My Covers" page, the books that have covers but no ISBN do not link anywhere. That leads me to believe the code basically says:
* Grab cover, if possible (if no cover, skip to next title)
* Grab ISBN
* If ISBN exists, link to Amazon

That third step could be made a lot more complicated, but perhaps more satisfying:
* If picture came from LT database, create link back to LT
* If picture came from Amazon, create link back to Amazon (required by Amazon ToS)

I agree with GreyHead in that it was undoubtedly a spur-of-the-moment coding project -- Tim even says it was during a break -- so there's reason to believe the internal coding could be made much better.

IIRC there are a whole bunch of spacer images (single pixels) as well which I think come from the times when there is an ISBN (or ASIN) but Amazon doesn't have a cover - so you can have more links than covers.

Thanks for all your helpful information. I tried it out tonight and made a decent-looking mosaic with only 550 pictures in my LT library.

I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know how to post the picture somewhere in case anyone would like to see how a mosiac picture turns out with so few books. The file was too big to go on my "profile" spot, and I don't know how blogging works. Guess I'll have to learn something new again tomorrow night (or whenever I have time).

> 57

> The file was too big to go on my "profile" spot, (...)

You might be able to shrink it to suitable size using e.g. the freeware image tool IrfanView by Irfan Skiljan.



If you mind: it's available in a whole bunch of different languages, too.

Very nice addition - and something that I've eyed for a few projecty-ideas.

Thanks much!

This is really motivating me to get missing covers scanned. Going from 2400+ books to 1450 covers was a bit of a surprise..

Psst...

How to find your non-covers:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=26488

At the moment, the Amazon links are closed twice (HTML bug) ...

Maybe it's just me, but I have several books that I've uploaded covers for, and on the All My Covers page they show up as the default "no cover" image.

Anyone else having that problem?

63: Yup. Same here.

Same problem for me (am part way through a project of scanning over 1000 books with no covers so it's quite a big deal). I'm also seeing some black spaces.

63, 65> Actually worse for some user uploaded covers I selected I get either the default, an amazon cover, or something completely blank.

>63: Yes, I just noticed that yesterday too.

Yeah, this page is no longer pretty. :(

8> Yes, I too would like to be able to only see a list of my books without covers so I can begin updating them.

Also, I'd like to be able to see all of my uploaded covers with a count of who is using them. (Sort of makes the effort a little more worthwhile.)

69> bookworm147, you can see the list of books divided by types of cover - on your Profile or Home page>Statistics>Book Covers you'll find a list of books with Amazon covers, member-uploaded covers that you chose, member-uploaded covers LT chose for you, chosen blanks, and no covers - with a count of how many in each category. Click the links in the list to go to your library with only those books displayed.

But I don't know any way to see all your uploaded covers, let alone how many are using them. Yeah, it would be neat.

70> jjmcgaffey, thanks for the tip! I'm still a bit new to LT and discovering some of these things.

Everyone is still discovering things, however long they've been on the site. Well, maybe some of those who preceded Talk can say they know all the features...but I've been on for 1.5 years and just the other day discovered a new thing and rediscovered something I'd forgotten about. Tim & Co do a wonderful job of adding features...

I think All Your Covers page should skip no cover books. I mean, they don't have covers!

72>

Please do not presume to speak for everyone.

74> So the only one who understands everything on the site is the one who refuses to explain it? Oy vey.

76>

I'm pretty sure Tim, Chris, and many others understand everything on the site, aren't you?

> 77

Of course ! They understand everything on the site--by definition !

Boekerij: You are a troll.

> 79

How do you mean ? Isn't it true ? Is anything wrong with my confirming lorax's Msg. 77 ?

You are the best, you are the brightest, you are amazing, aren't you ? You know it all, don't you ?

(curious) If I am a troll, and as You are stating, I am, is lorax a troll too ? Why (not) ?

More curious still : you may try and explain why, even though I may be innumerate (am I ?), and even though I have uploaded about 1,500 personal (high quality) cover image scans, my All your covers page is showing far less cover images.

70> It would be nice if those statistics updated properly. Mine is wildly inaccurate.

I'll vote for an updated troll count/statistics too. If it was accurate enough we could verify if the old advice of not feeding trolls actually works :-) (I think being nice to trolls is a better idea, but thats just an unproved theory)

>65

I think I've worked out what the problem is.

Where I've entered details of the book manually, and scanned the cover myself, these are all ones which "all you covers" isn't picking up.

One for the techies, clearly!

I am trying to use my covers to make a mosaic, but I can't get them from my all covers page to another spot like AndreaMosaics.
I was able to create a collection by saving covers individually, but with several thousand covers this would take forever.
How can I get all the covers at one time?
Thanks

Copyright varies from country to country although there are international copyright conventions. The copyright of a book depends on the country in which it was first published unless foreign rights have been sold. It can be quite complicated. Did you know that Peter Pan by James M. Barrie had its copyright extended in perpetuity and the fees go to a children's hospital in London England?

84> Try saving the page (save page as>web page, complete) . You get an HTML file, and a folder with everything that belongs to that page - pull out the stuff at the end with names (instead of numbers) and you have a folder full of your covers.

When the actual cover is not available and one selects from the generic covers how do you get the title to appear on the cover? If I arrange my library by covers the titles will appear but they won't when the library is arranged as a list or when I use the site Tim has set up here. Please can anyone help?

Is this supposed to work? I mean, was it abandoned while it still had problems, or does it now work for other users (not me)?

When I try to use this
http://www.librarything.com/allyourcovers.php
all it does is give me the amazon covers for my books, even though I don't use any amazon covers at all in my library.

It's only ever given me Amazon covers. I think that's how it was originally set up.

sigh. Maybe after collections something can be done to make it work for those who upload their own. I can't make widgets work either, because of amazon covers.

It'd be real nice to have "All My Covers" return only the ones the *have* covers; I'd love to do one of those mosaic things, but my list has so many books with default covers that mine would be predominantly navy blue :-/

>91 Widgets is using my custom covers - not just Amazon covers. At least the new and improved ones. That was one of the first things I noticed. My Easton Presses are the Easton Presses covers and not the overwhelmingly popular combined Amazon edition cover, for starters. I also have foreign editions of books never on Amazon that are coming through as well with my personally uploaded covers...

I guess I could try again, but the widget I selected and then put on my website did nothing. The bug finder thing in firefox said there was a bug on line 35, so I read that, and it was about amazon. I gave up.

It's not pulling in the covers I've selected; they are either the default 'blank' cover or some other cover. It's been suggested that this is because there are no ISBNs for those items, but I've checked and that's not the case at all.
Very disappointing .. got all excited about this for a second there.
:(

is there a way to see all my covers with a particular tag? i want to do a mosaic of the books i read in 2009 so i'm trying to get only those books tagged with a stop date in 2009. otherwise i need to manually delete all the covers not from this year.