see an author's book covers

It would be great to have a page associated with an author to view all the author's various book covers. It would help with identifying particular "lost" editions ("name that book!"); it would help those of us migrating series to publisher series; and it would just look really cool.

-- lquilter

Oh, that would be shiny.

For the authors with 8 bazillion covers, pagination and/or a "more" option?

Nice!

All books one cover or all covers of all books?

For 'Name that book' usage it would have to be all covers.

Of course if we could search the CoverThing tags...

All covers of all books, up to X number of covers. Then something would have to kick in, whether pagination, more, etc.

And skip books without covers from LT or Amazon. Show that they exist as "and X books without covers).

What #7 said.

-- lquilter

Related idea (but for your catalog) here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/104594

I'm not clear what the benefit would be.

Where would these display? Surely a visit to John Steinbeck's page wouldn't by default show all his covers?

And if I'm clicking a link that says something like 'View this author's covers', I can't see how that is preferable to going to the East of Eden work page and veiwing the covers there.

I'll admit I could be hampered here by lack of imagination.

Oh no!

Place me in the opposite court on this one.

Covers need to stay with the work.

A seperate page of author covers would be fine, but please keep them off of the main author page.

jseger (#10), 2wonderY (#11): Yes, I envision a link from the author's page: "View this author's covers" (or something like that).

On the page itself you would see all the covers, ideally sortable by various features (or randomized).

I think this would be cool in itself, but if it doesn't tweak your fancy, that's okay; we don't all have to like the same features.

It's way more *useful* for identification purposes ("name that book", "what was that edition", "does this author have any books in this series", etc.) than having to click through to each inividual title, and then click "show all covers" on each individual title.

-- lquilter

I would like if a thumbnail cover displayed next to each work on the authors page. That would be shiny.

>13 jseger9000: It would be shiny, but I can envision a fairly poor experience in the case of prolific authors; just think of Isaac Asimov! I would hope it would be something you could toggle on and off.

#15 - Poor as in the covers that would show, or poor as in the additional load time?

I could see clicking on an Asimov touchstone and then going to get some coffee while the page loads (sorta like what happens if you are ever unfortunate enough to be combining/seperating Shakespeare).

But if it were implemented and loaded quickly, how cool would that be?

16> Agreed. Why evaluate the feature based on assuming Tim will do a poor job of coding it?

I think poor, as in the additional load time.

>>>sorta like what happens if you are ever unfortunate enough to be combining/seperating Shakespeare

I thought AnnieMod was going to tackle that job... but she seems to not have time for LibraryThing lately let alone that infinite task... and yeah, Shakespeare is still very much a mess.

18> Are you familiar with dynamic loading? There's no reason you have to load things until you actually click the "more" link. Tim does this all over LT. Also known as "AJAX".

ETA: A good example of this is on the covers for a work. Like:
http://www.librarything.com/work/995/covers

It doesn't actually load all 268 covers until you click the link. And then, it doesn't reload the entire page but rather fetches those other covers and ads them into the page as they arrive.

Yes, I've experienced that. It does not always work as it's supposed to work... And it sometimes takes forever... Sometimes, a few of the covers refuse to load... so, I normally don't stick around when page load time is poor.

>16 jseger9000:, 18
Poor as in you really can't take in that much info - Asimov has over a thousand works listed on his page.

20> You're mixing things up a bit. There's no magical thing that can be done to load 268 covers that won't take as long as however long your internet connection takes to load those covers. Just can't be done. So this isn't supposed to solve that. My point is that you go to the works page and it only shows a maximum of 20 covers in each section. This way, it doesn't slow down loading the cover page simply because there are LOTS of covers for a work.

Now, you can have disagreements on whether 20 covers in each section is the right amount, etc. etc. But the general idea is that you don't slow down the loading of a page for OPTIONAL features like this, simply because you hit a work with a lot of covers. People with slow connections simply don't click that "show all 268 covers" because they know it'll take a while. Not all features are going to be ideal for people with slow connections. Again, no magical way around that.

In much the same way, this feature (and the other one I suggested) could be wisely implemented where it's irrelevant if an author has a lot of books. It simply stops after a certain number and allows you to load the rest of them if you have the bandwidth to make that not a painful process.

Sometimes 6 covers is too many, sometimes 20 covers will load quickly. The only way to change that is to insure that all covers are the same (or close to the same) in file size... and yes, I don't click links I know will take awhile to load. It's not always my internet connection that slows things either.

Yesterday, while I was doing a survey, the site hosting that survey suddenly slowed to a crawl. I was almost finished, so I put up with the slowness. That site had the problem though; not me. I was able to load pages from other sites at my usual speed.

23> I just don't get where all this is going. This isn't a feature that would be stuck on the main author page. So no one would be forced to be slowed down by it unless they actually went to the page FOR the feature. So is there a real argument in there against this feature based on this whole line of reasoning? Sorry, but I just don't understand what point is being made as it applies to the actual topic.

#24 - Sorry. I think I derailed the conversation with my post #13. Mine would have affected the actual author page for all users, which is where I think #'s 21 on had issues.

I'll start a new thread for my idea and stop messing up this one.

Bump!

see also:

* http://www.librarything.com/topic/55228
* http://www.librarything.com/topic/104553