Advice needed: Other images for books?

We're nearly done moving cover images to the "new" image system. Various good implications follow. Among them, we're going to be allowing people to upload other images for books, such as front pages, spine shots, notable interior pages, allowing people to take a picture of themselves with their favorite book etc. What advice do you have for this feature?

The feature implicates various local-vs-global issues. My solution starts with: Primary covers remain a separate thing--a book can only have one primary cover, and continue to be automatically shared under some conditions (eg., if you upload a cover for a book with an ISBN but no Amazon cover).

But I'm not sure about the implications in other categories. My thought is that establish some categories—cover, spine, front page, back cover—in case we want to work with them later. Your images for a book are called out for you on that book—ie., go in a special section. Other people's images can be seen, but are kept separate unless you snag them as your own.

You might want to have some way of suggesting these if the front matches.

Just yesterday I was thinking that it would be fun to upload the back of a book I was scanning as well as the front. I don't think I'd do this often, but sometimes the backs are really fun.

I think the biggest use here is going to be cover pages for old books. Google (among others) just makes them the covers. We might want to allow someone to see them that way in their catalog, but it shouldn't be required. We should be able to differentiate. Ditto shelf images. We already have some shelf images sneaking to the covers.

Frontispieces. Inscriptions. Endpapers.

Are they non-overlapping buckets? Inscriptions can be on any page, no?

Ability to mark covers other people uploaded or amazon provides as awful pieces of junk.

Or people uploading spines as covers, backs as covers, covers as spines, etc. You know this is going to happen. Technical literacy is a spectrum.

It would be a shame if the primary cover image HAD to be an image of the front cover - there are a lot of spine and angled images which seem to me to the best choice for some works.

Can I make a(nother) plea for there to be some searchable differentiation between high quality covers and others. I accept that there can be arguments as to what 'high quality' means, but I would happily accept the current labels if I could raise a list of all my books without a high quality cover.

Right. We need to allow people to use them as THEIR primary cover, but not to have spine images and so forth automatically perfuse across the system, as many (most?) won't want them.

#9 by timspalding> The question is, would they be able to set what is the primary "cover" to a spine on one book and an actual COVER on the other. Or would it just be a toggle to view ALL your books as covers, as spines, etc.?

On a related note, I think it'd be a bad idea to let the term "cover" drift and mean "spine", "back cover", "title page", etc. A spine is not a cover. We already have enough headaches with "author" sometimes meaning "photographer", and "book" sometimes meaning "cd".

How about "book at large" pictures like this?

Or this?

Since books are all different shapes, will you be tying in book dimensions to the display options? The covers view scales all books to the same width, and, while I suppose you could scale all spines to the same height, it would be fun to see the books' sizes relative to each other in real life.

#11 by paradoxosalpha> Isn't that just inviting people to post copyrighted photos? I'm certain "fair use" won't cover it, either.

I'm also a little worried about people posting images of inside pages for the same reason.

ETA: And I think your second photo you just added might highlight other... issues.

> 13

Hm. Quite possibly.

You're right about inside images, too. There's no "fair use" for a copyright-protected illustration, as much as we might think that (e.g.) a recent frontispiece deserves to be shown off.

I agree on the term "cover." We need to sharply distinguish between "cover" and "other images."

On fair use, general LT policy is (now) to not police stuff like this. It gets us into legal trouble if we police it, because then what about the stuff we don't police. Also, on a practical matter, title pages and cover pages are going to be mostly used for old, old books that don't have covers—the way Google does it.

I'm thinking we have a small number of categories—non-overlapping buckets—and then, when you choose something other than cover it always gives you the tag area and we suggest some tags. For example, "book at large" would be an encouraged tag, along with "me and my favorite book" (or whatever), but they'd both fall under "other."

The minimal categories would be, I think: Cover, back cover, spine, title page, other

Frontispiece would therefore be other with the "frontispiece" tag.

9>

Since there are already spine images and so forth (including random placeholders that have nothing to do with the books) percolating through the system as "cover" images, will there be a way to indicate "this is not a cover, please do not share"?

Clearly there must be.

>16 lorax: - I think Tim is planning to do this, yes.

Generally, I guess I'm in favor of just a few categories here. I don't think we want to have a huge number of different categories beyond cover, back cover, spine, title page, maybe an "inscription" category, and a general catchall.

Since I don't particularly want to spend a great deal of time dealing with takedown notices, I'd prefer that we not do anything that will promote or encourage uploading of various parts of books that might fall under copyright protection.

I think there needs to be the various categories and then "use as MY cover image" for people who want to use something else as their cover image.

17>

I'm glad to hear that, Tim, but I certainly didn't think that it was "clear". There are a lot of things that I would have thought would be self-evident that never happened, and a lot of things that you thought were obvious that many people found baffling.

18>

Frankly I'm less concerned with things that would warrant a takedown notice than with the idiosyncratic and personal - not only the new things like "picture of me with my book" that will now have a specific place but also the pre-existing things like the 'suggested cover' cat graphic that appears for many books because someone has used it as a personal default cover.

>20 lorax: - Yeah, I hear you. But you won't have to deal with the takedown notices, either :-) I agree with you more generally, though - the other parts concern me as well, and we're going to have to handle it carefully.

Tim and I were just discussing the question of what to do with boxed set images (like at www.librarything.com/work/21473/covers). Any thoughts?

21: Boxed sets usually have a single associated ISBN don't they? You could also maybe make cover images available up and down the Contains/Contained In relationship somehow.

>22 saltmanz: - Right, the question isn't so much about the work itself (those are handled in other places), but of the "cover" images. Do we need to handle them differently from other cover images (since generally the images people use of boxed sets aren't actually of the covers, etc.)?

23>

I don't think you need to treat them differently; for the boxed sets, they're as good a 'cover' as anything. Otherwise you need special treatment for all sorts of non-book materials. There's an established convention on LT of pretending that everything is a book, whether it's a book or a bottle of perfume or a map, and it seems odd to suddenly start giving non-book items different treatment in this one area.

>24 lorax: - Well, remember we've got format stuff coming down the pipeline soon too, so that paradigm's going to be shifting just a bit in any event. But yes, we can certainly just leave images for boxed sets the way they're currently treated, if folks don't think they need to be handled in a different way.

Yeah, I think a picture of a boxed set is adequate for a boxed set. I wouldn't worry too much that it's strictly not a cover.

#15 by timspalding / #18 by jbd1> Jeremy gets what I'm talking about here. You can avoid responsibility by saying "we don't police what people upload in the general upload bin". But if you create a bin that says "comic book scans" and people upload scanned in comic books... well, I think you lose a bit of your protection.

That's why I'm thinking you should be careful, and a "books at large" bin is just going to encourage copyright violations. Heck, the very first image posted as an example of this is a copyrighted image. Kind of proves my point.

So, does anyone see any major difficulties with the overall categories being something like:

cover
back cover
title page
spine
other

And then within "other" something like 5-10 (but no more than that) "suggested tags" that would sort of "herd" images into those particular buckets, so that we could display those types of images in various ways if we wanted to?

>27 brightcopy: - Yes, this.

I think it might be better to relabel the catalog column from Cover to Image or Main Image or Primary Image, otherwise people are going to think that you can't choose a different view for the image in their catalog. Similarly the Change Cover link when you click on the image in your catalog should be changed to Change Image and it should go to the Images page instead of the Cover page where the section titles called Change Cover, Upload a Cover, and Member-Uploaded Covers will all have to be changed.

#30 by jjwilson61> Yes. Though Tim agreed we need to avoid calling it a "cover" when it's not a cover, four messages later he was already calling it "cover" again (and in terms that sounds like they'd be using a non-cover for their primary image). It's just so easy to slip into since LT has previously only had covers.

I'm greatly looking forward to my perfume collection finally getting "Primary Images" instead of "Cover Images". :)

I think you most definitely need to differentiate between a cover and an image, and what 'type' each of those are...
Jeremy's list seems reasonable to me.

If I can then find a list of my Amazon (still) and non-HQ covers I will be very happy.
If cover view - in my catalogue - improves with this - I will be VERY happy.

Will the 'view' on the cover page then reflect this order - because I would personally prefer to see HQ covers first etc etc?

I would like to see my library in spine view. I could imagine different views:
- Shelf view (all spines in the same high)
- Shelf view (spines in relative sizes)
- Pile view (pile high xy books)
- Pile view (different piles sorted by author, language, series, OPD, reading dates, tags, collections, ...)

Spines in german books are usually handled different to english books.
In a pile of english books, you can read book titles easily (direction: top to bottom).
In a pile of german books, the book tittles are upside down (direction: bottom to top).
Any ideas to handle that?
I would like to have a attribute to identify what kind of cover it is (normal {english} and up side down).
So we would be able to see shelf view as:
- original direction
- all normal
- all upside down

I just got to this thread, and read all of it. I find no discussion of what the purpose of a primary/cover image is. How can we agree on what type(s) of image(s) constitute a primary image/cover if we don't have a general agreement on it's value or purpose.

Now this may seem obvious to everyone, but that doesn't mean it's obvious in the same way. Some want a primary image that clearly defines the edition that is in their library. This is often (but not always) the cover. Sometimes, the cover gives no hint as to the nature of the book or work, and the primary image must be (or, at least include) the spine for it to uniquely define the specific edition. However, others (and I am one) may want the image to help them find the book on a wall of shelves, so the spine image is almost always the needed image. For books in slipcases which have their own spine labels, the slipcase spine may be the image that best identifies the book on the shelf. For these two examples (image to uniquely identify the specific edition and image to identify the book on the shelf), an angled image of the book, showing both spine and cover, serves both purposes pretty well. But I some comments above seem to feel these images are not 'correct' for the primary image. There may be other commonly held purposes within the LT community, but these are the two that I've become aware of. The discussion above seems to indicate that many think it absurd that some people would want the spine image as the primary image. This may simply be due to the use of the term 'cover' for this image, but we have a chance to more carefully consider both purpose and terminology here.

No solutions or answers here. Just want to be sure these issues are not forgotten before changes are rolled out.

Os.

>35 Osbaldistone: - Right, I think the idea is that you'll be able to set the "primary image" that appears for your book (so if you want to make it the title page, or the spine, you can do that), but if that image isn't a cover, it won't show up on the Covers page for other people to choose from.

^34, I like the idea of spine view. I think I would prefer spines in relative sizes.

Still hoping that we'll regain the option of front cover view with fixed height instead of fixed width, so that my beautiful collection of picture books stops looking like the books are minature editions next to my "regular" adult books.

Being able to add the occasional "other" image also sounds like fun -- I have a lot of vintage books with decorate endpapers, for example.

Another issue that I see not getting sufficient attention in the discussion above is that of work v. book. When we say book in this thread, do we mean book (as in the specific edition in my library or your library) or do we mean work (the author's creation that may appear on LT with various ISBNs, covers, etc.)? The failure to make this clear when rolling out new features has resulted in some wildly inconsistent data entry by enthusiastic LTers, followed by interminable debates on group threads. On the other hand, graceful handling of the work v. book issue when changing the book/work image functions could improve some of the annoying aspects of LT, such as the tendancey to display the wrong images of books in a publishers series.

Again, no solutions or answers. Just hope these issues are not forgotten before changes are rolled out.

Os.

>36 jbd1:
Yes, but if the spine is the best image for an edition, shouldn't I be able to capture an existing image that matches my edition? If not on the Covers page, on some alternate search results page.

Os.

>38 Osbaldistone: - Agreed that there needs to be more work/book clarity, yes. I'm hoping we can achieve that by various means before too much longer, and this may have a role to play there. With covers, for the most part we're talking about "book" - you choose your cover image (or whatever image); the cover image at the work level will (I'm assuming, correct me if I'm wrong, Tim), the cover used most often. When it comes to things like correct covers for particular publisher series, &c., that's going to have to be handled as we move toward a better system taking "versions" and "editions" into account.

>39 Osbaldistone: - Yes, certainly. Presumably there'll be a page of "other images" available that you'll be able to choose from should you wish to.

I'm a little confused by what you're asking in this context, Os. Work images are always just the collection of all the images people used for that work. And a most popular one that is automatically chosen for the primary image. I font see how that will really change a lot.

ETA: That's what happens when I stop mid-post to hey a baby to sleep. Jeremy pretty much dais what I was thinking.

Re. #34: "I would like to see my library in spine view."

And I'd like to have unicorns prancing through my living room pooping out gold coins.

Who is going to SCAN those spine views? Unlike covers for which there's at least one major source (Amazon), there is no repository of scanned spines. There are currently nearly seven million "unique works" on LibraryThing ... if it takes even a minute to scan, crop, and save a spine image, running 3 shifts a day, seven days a week, that's almost FIVE THOUSAND solid days of effort to get a spine-scan database.

Are you volunteering to start scanning them in? It would only be about 13 years of 24/7 work!

 

^BTRIPP, good point!

A valid calculation, perhaps, but you'd be really surprised what the power of the massed Thingumabrarianship can achieve!

How do you scan spines anyway? On my flatbed the lid won't close and I'm not sure you get a good image without closing the lid at least part way. Maybe it would work to scan 5 or 6 together and use photoshop to create separate image files? Or is a camera the best option?

If I really wanted to scan spines - I don't - I would go for the first option you mention.

>42 BTRIPP:

I think a lot of folks may be taking photos instead of scanning.

Given that about 1/2 my library is of books without ISBNs (either too old or from Easton Press, Folio Society, Franklin LIbrary, etc.), the existance of Amazon images is only of limited help. Even for books with ISBNs, they image on Amazon is often different in some way from mine. Sometimes Amazon has the image for one of my ISBN-free books, but only because a user scanned it, much as LT users have been doing since early days.

Os.

On the work issue, LibraryThing always chooses the most popular cover—Amazon or not, ISBN or not—to be the work's primary image. Beyond that, your copy gets an image based on ISBN, unless you choose an alternate cover. The ISBN-based cover can come from either Amazon or, if there is none, LibraryThing's calculation of the most popular user cover for the ISBN. But you never get a cover based on the work alone.

>45 jjwilson61: I've scanned a few spines ((AT)spines in my catalog) because the cover really has nothing to distinguish itself.

I put the book down on the flatbed and hold the pages straight up while my scanner captures the cover and spine. Then I crop out the cover and leave the spine as the graphic.

I probably wouldn't scan my entire collection -- unless there was a field for bookshelf location, thus enabling a true "spine" view. Then I might be tempted!

Edit: Forgot the at sign means something else in messages.

I've got quite a few cover-and-spine images, for books (as legallypuzzled mentions) that have nothing distinctive on the front. I open the book in the middle, set it so that the spine is snugged in the corner, and scan cover and spine together. It comes out a bit wider than it is high, but not enough to be a problem (unlike a naked spine, which with the width-primary sizing ends up ridiculously tall!), and I can usually tell which book I'm looking at.

Not sure whether those would count as cover or as Other.

>50 jjmcgaffey:
For the same reason, I usually scan the plain cover with the spine so I can tell what the book is. Since the cover is there, I would hope everyone would be okay with considering a cover (or 'primary image') for our purposes.

Os.

I'm currently scanning a lot of my books, so I thought I'd revive this thread. For those of us who have large libraries you really need to add some help for locating which books need scanning. The cover statistics give stuff like:
Amazon-provided cover (23), Member-uploaded cover, chosen by you (1219), Member-uploaded cover, best-guess for ISBN (787), No cover (3296)
But no way of finding out which of the 1219 covers I've uploaded and which I haven't.
We need either some way of getting this shown in catalogue view or/and some way of putting this into the tab-separated export.

Also in the statistics, just below No Cover is a "more details" link which reveals statistics for low-quality or best-guess covers that need replacing.