Amazon covers, reloaded

That preturnatural quiet you hear is the sound of the way LibraryThing handles Amazon covers, completely changed. It's not everywhere, but you'll notice that your catalog in cover view looks different. Basically, if Amazon behaves, we should never "miss" a cover—a problem discussed elsewhere at great length. And we're playing with image sizes, for example making the cover view sport equally-tall books.

T

Nice Tim, so does this mean we'll be able to enlarge covers for a closer look too? :)

But why do you want them equally tall? It sounds too regimented to me. I like them proportional to each other.

Holy cow! What a difference! I only use cover view when I want to gaze proudly at how many books I have (it's very handy for that), but I can see a big difference and it looks great!

Heather

Small side effect - When I inspected my covers I noticed some covers had disappeared. They were mainly UK editions and I suspect I'd sourced from amazon.co.uk.
I don't know if they'd been missing a while anyway (maybe amazon had dropped that isbn?).

But: this post here reports recent covers vanishing which were sourced from amazon.jp.... may be worth looking into?

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=16244

Any chance of a book-level checkbox for "don't use Amazon cover"?

The new covers look great. I, too, would like to request a way to find out which books in my library have Amazon covers and which do not. This will help me re-tag books for the blog widget so they don't show up as a broken image link on my blog. Thanks!

Ryn: when the Dark is Rising sequence was republished recently with new covers, the covers in my catalog changed with it. I fixed it by using the images uploaded by other users. Is this an option for the books you have?

Something strange is going on in my library. When I look a my catalog in list view, I see all the covers I should see. But when I look at in cover view, many of the covers are missing, including covers from very recently added books. Why do they appear in one but not the other????

Also, when I go to my book page for these books, the cover is missing. It seems these might be books that I didn't add from Amazon, but I though LT grabbed covers from Amazon that match the ISBN, and I don't understand why the covers would show up in list view but not in cover view or on the book page.

I'm having the same issues as message #9.

Interesting. Can you give me an example from your catalog? Maybe Amazon started nixing our image fetching.

We'll solve it.

Example: The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas and Sweet Accompaniments.

Thanks.

>12 rebeccanyc:

When I follow that link, I see the cover.

#13 That's because it takes you to the Work page, not the page that shows my copy (which I believe is only visible to me, but I'll now try to provide a link to it). Here is the link to my book page, without photo: http://www.librarything.com/work-info.php?book=18012089.

I'm having two problems.

1 - I have covers that show up as a thumbnail in List view but don't have any image at all in Cover view. An example is Indiana Jones and the Philosopher's Stone.

2 - Covers which I uploaded from the internet last week are totally missing now. An example is Usher's Passing.

Sorry guys. I'll fix it soon. House guests, and nobody knows this piece of code yet.

I've got the same thing happening with a few titles, as well. Is the fix a site-wide thing or does it need to be handled on an individual entry basis?

Me too.

I've noticed that, for me, the "missing" covers are all GIFs that I'd previously uploaded to LT (such as here and here). I don't seem to be having problems with uploaded JPGs.

...a clue, perhaps?

>8 Thwaite: ArmyAngel1986 , yep can change some missing covers to the user-supplied. Thanks,

#18, No, my problem is with some? all? of the books I entered from non-Amazon sources for which LT grabbed the correct Amazon cover by ISBN (as opposed to ones where I corrected the Amazon-supplied cover with a user-supplied one).

I don't know that there is a pattern, considering the sources being listed here so far. In my case, all the problem images are linked to Amazon. Some of them aren't even coming up under the work and/or edit pages, but appear as a choice when pulling up the change cover page.

Hey. Well, I discovered that Amazon sometimes has "medium"-sized images, but not "large." I had thought the two always went hand-in-hand. Anyway, that was the problem with the Indiana Jones book, and probably others.

I had to delete what I knew about books without covers, and change some code. The new code works like the last. Something may come up white or broken the first time you see it, but, after that, the system knows whether Amazon has the image, and adjusts accordingly. There's also a new technique for dealing with covers, such that a book without an Amazon image may get the user-uploaded cover as it's primary "work" image.

Anyway, let me know if you see more problems—always after a refresh confirms the problem is there.

My missing covers are back now, but this is happening http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=16317

"There's also a new technique for dealing with covers, such that a book without an Amazon image may get the user-uploaded cover as it's primary "work" image."

Please give us a way to disable the default cover then, and switch back to "no cover" when the online cover doesn't match our book.

22>

With this change, the .GIF files that I had previously uploaded to LT are now displaying Amazon images (see the links in #18 above). Are the .GIFs are gone for good? Most of my uploads were .JPGs, so it won't be that big a deal for me, but it could cause a huge problem for others...

I checked a few of my .gif covers, and found them still displayed.

Please give us a way to disable the default cover then, and switch back to "no cover" when the online cover doesn't match our book.

Yes, please.

#22, #23 I still have the same problem I described in 9, 12, & 14. I tried clearing my cache, but that didn't solve the problem.

I believe I have figured out a possible reason. All (?) the books that no longer have covers are ones for which I've used the 13-digit ISBN. If I try to add the Amazon-provided cover, it switches me to the 10-digit ISBN. I could go through and add the Amazon-provided covers manually, but it would be nice if Amazon recognized the 13-digit versions that LOC provides (or that I entered manually).

>22 timspalding:

Give me an example? The way it works is this. If you're on a work page, you get the work's image. If you click on YOUR copy, you should get your copy's image.

>27 myshelves:

Okay. I'll work on it.

>28 rebeccanyc:

Can do. Give me an example I can test?

msg 29 Give me an example

Victory at Vimy entered with 13-digit ISBNs from the Canadian National Catalogue.

http://www.librarything.com/work-info.php?book=12639494

http://www.librarything.com/work-info.php?book=14771442

#29

The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas and Sweet Accompaniments, entered from LOC with 13-digit ISBN

Cover appears in list view, but not in cover view or on my personal page for the book:

http://www.librarything.com/work/2830100&book=18012089

>29 timspalding:

Always, entered from LoC (note: I tried entering this from LoC by searching ISBN 13, but this still doesn't work, although when I searched author and title it added the book with the correct ISBN 13.) The cover appears on the work/social page but not on my book info page. I ran into the same problem before I read this thread and just selected the Amazon covers for a couple books, but I would prefer not to as it changes the ISBN.

Okay, ISBN13s are working now. Amazon always uses the 10 for its image URLs, so I'm converting them at need.

Thanks!!

Tim, as of now, the covers are showing up on book pages (thanks!), but still not in cover view in my catalog.