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Updated CoverGuess and Contest!

We’ve revamped CoverGuess, our collaborative cover-tagging game. We’ve made it faster and changed some rules. Very soon we’ll be releasing a cool new feature based on it. (Hint: You’ll be able to search for covers by what’s on them.) And we’re giving out prizes to LibraryThing members who play.

CoverGuess is a LibraryThing institution. Starting in 2010, we invited members to describe book covers, racking up points for matching other members. In 13 years members have added more than 3.2 million tags to book covers!

Now we’re launching a new and improved version of the game, to get it ready for a new search interface, with some new rules:

Eight tags. As searchers are likely to focus on the most significant elements, we’re asking members to focus on the eight most relevant tags. (You can add more, but you won’t receive points for them.)
Omit bare colors. And we’re asking members to avoid bare color tags, like “blue” or “red.” You are still encouraged to use colors when describing things on the cover, such “blue horse” or “yellow flower.” (We’re going to get covers’ predominant colors another way, so we don’t want you to have to waste your time labeling them.)
Multi-Word Bonus. Scoring has changed slightly. You now get a bonus for multi-word tags. For example, matching “green field” is worth 2x points, and matching “bird in cage” is worth 3x.

Contest

We’re running a month-long contest to celebrate the launch of the new CoverGuess! We’ll be keeping score from May 12th–June 12th, with prizes going to the top ten players, as well as ten other randomly selected participants.

The top player will receive an extra grand prize as well.

We’ve got a selection of stickers, coasters, tote bags, stamps, t-shirts and CueCats (more details to come) to give away, so come check it out here, and start tagging: https://www.librarything.com/coverguess

Questions? Come join the conversation on Talk.

Labels: book covers, contests, CoverGuess, covers, games

CoverGuess: The game that helps people find books…

I just released an amusing diversion called CoverGuess.

Check it out here, and talk about it here.

What is CoverGuess?

CoverGuess is a sort of game. We give you covers, and you describe them in words. If you guess the same things as other players, you get points.

Why are you doing this?

The goal is to have fun, but also to build up a database of cover descriptions, to answer questions like “Do you have that book with bride on the bicycle?”

What’s the best way to do it?

Think about it how you’d describe the cover to someone—pick out the most significant elements. Does it have a car or a pair of shoes? Color terms are good, and so are terms like “blurry” or “sepia.” Above all, pick terms other players will be using.

How do points work?

You get one point for every matched term, for each other member who had it. So, if you say “car” and “dog” and two other members said “car” and one said “dog,” you get three points. Obviously, it’s better if you’re not the first member to tag the image, but the system randomizes that aspect. When you’re the first to tag an item, you get 0.25 points for your effort.

Aren’t you trying to use members’ free labor to make money?

Yes and no. All the data here is released under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License, and will be available in feed form. That means any non-profit entity, like a library, can use it without charge. We also commit to license it on the same terms to any bookstore with less than $10 million in sales. That leaves huge companies. If any want it, we’ll charge them!

Anything else?

It was partially inspired by Google’s ImageLabeler. Our anti-spam engine does something similar too.

The whole thing was perhaps summed up best in a tweet to me:

Labels: book covers, new feature, new features

Cover page changes

I’ve revamped each work’s “covers” page—a.k.a. “change cover”—to emphasize the higher-quality images among out 1,000,000 covers.

1. The images are bigger, so you can see quality, and because covers are so beautiful.
2. The algorithm now sorts larger covers higher, so that members are more likely to pick higher-quality versions of their cover. The existing sort order was reinforcing the use of low-quality images, even when LT had high-quality ones.
3. High-quality images now say “high quality” and list the original dimensions.

Here are some examples: The Odyssey, Pnin, The Kama Sutra, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Origin of Species, Life of Pi, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Labels: book covers, covers, new features

Kaboom!

Did you hear that? It was the sound of LibraryThing announcing A million free covers for your library or bookstore.

Won’t someone in the library world, um, blog this?

Labels: book covers, coverthing

A million free covers from LibraryThing

A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we’ve decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.

The basics. The process, patterned after the Amazon.com cover service, is simplicity itself:

Take an ISBN, like 0545010225
Put your Developer Key and the ISBN into a URL, like so:
http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY /medium/isbn/0545010225
Put that in an image tag, like so:
<img src="http://covers.librarything.com/devkey/KEY/medium/isbn/0545010225">
And your website, library catalog or bookstore has a cover.

Easy details. Each cover comes in three sizes. Just replace “medium” with “small” or “large.”

As with Amazon, if we don’t have a cover for the book, we return a transparent 1×1 pixel GIF image. So you can put the cover-image on OPAC pages without knowing if we have the image. If we have it, it shows; if we don’t, it doesn’t.

The Catch? To get covers, you’ll need a LibraryThing Developer Key—any member can get one. This puts a top limit on the number of covers you can retrieve per day—currently 1,000 covers. In fact, we only count it when a cover is made from the original, o our actual limit will be much higher. We encourage you to cache the files locally.

You also agree to some very limited terms:

You do not make LibraryThing cover images available to others in bulk. But you may cache bulk quantities of covers.
Use does not involve or promote a LibraryThing competitor.
If covers are fetched through an automatic process (eg., not by people hitting a web page), you may not fetch more than one cover per second.

You will note that unlike the new API to our Common Knowledge data, you are not required to link back to LibraryThing. But we would certainly appreciate it.

Caveats. Some caveats:

At present only about 913,000 covers are accessible, the others being non-ISBN covers.
Accuracy isn’t guaranteed–this is user data–and coverage varies.
Some covers are blurrier than we’d like, particularly at the “large” size. This is sometimes about original files and sometimes about our resizing routines. We’re working on the latter.

Why are you doing this? The goal is half promotional and half humanitarian.

First, some background. This service “competes” with Amazons cover service, now part of Amazon Web Services. Amazon’s service is, quite simply, better. They have far more covers, and no limit on the number of requests. By changing the URL you can do amazing things to Amazon covers.

The catch is that Amazon’s Terms of Service require a link-back. If you’re trying to make money from Amazon Affiliates, this is a good thing. But libraries and small bookstores have been understandably wary about linking to Amazon. Recent changes in Amazon’s Terms of Service have deepened this worry.

Meanwhile, there are a number of commercial cover providers. They too are probably, on average, better. But they cost money. Not surprisingly many libraries and bookstores skip covers, or paste them in manually from publisher sites.

That’s too bad. Publishers and authors want libraries and bookstores to show their covers. Under U.S. law showing covers to show off books for sale, rental or commentary falls under Fair Use in most circumstances. (We are not lawyers and make no warrant that your use will be legal.) We’ve felt for years that selling covers was a fading business. Serving the files is cheap and getting cheaper. It was time for someone to step up.*

So we’re stepping up. We’re hoping that by encouraging caching and limiting requests, we can keep our bandwidth charges under control. (If it really spikes, we’ll limit new developer keys for a while; if you submit this to Slashdot, we will be Slashdotted for sure!) And it will be good for LibraryThing—another example of our open approach to data. Although none of our competitors do anything like this—indeed our Facebook competitors don’t even allow export although, of course, they import LibraryThing files!—we think LibraryThing has always grown, in part, because we were the good guys—more “Do occasional good” than “Do no evil.”

If we build it, they will come. If the service really pick up, we’re going to add a way for publishers, bookstores and authors to get in on it. We’d be happy to trade some bandwidth out for what publishers know—high-quality covers, author photos, release dates and so forth. We’ve already worked with some publisher data, but we’d love to do more with it.

*In the past, we had been talking to the Open Libary project about a joint effort. We even sent them all our covers and a key to the identifiers that linked them. But nothing came of it. To some extent that was our fault, and to some extent not. (I think them and us would differ on the blame here.) In any case, I was tired of the time and transactional friction, and wanted to try a different approach.

Labels: apis, book covers, covers, open data

Zoomii: Book covers, physicality and cover usability

Have you played with Zoomii yet? It’s a new bookstore—a skin on Amazon.com—that uses a very attractive and dynamic cover-browsing interface. Instead of text, or a mix of text and graphics, Zoomii is all covers, laid out as if they were on an “endless shelf.” The effect is very impressive but also, and with due praise for the ingenuity involved, unsatisfying.

There is no shelf. Part of the problem stems from the “physicality” of the idea. The limits of shelves are the limits of the physical world. Importing physical limitations into the online world is a familiar error. As Clay Shirky remarked in 2005, we ought to be over it.

“People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you’d think we’d have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that’s forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you’d think we’d have learned that lesson by now.”

In Shirky’s analysis, not “learning that lesson” results in information architectures like that of the original Yahoo directory:

“Yahoo, faced with the possibility that they could organize things with no physical constraints, added the shelf back. They couldn’t imagine organization without the constraints of the shelf, so they added it back.”

In Zoomii’s case, the whole point was to add the shelf back. It was surely a conscious reversal, and therefore an audacious one, but like swearing off email in favor of handwritten correspondence or communiting in cars in favor of horses, not an efficient one.*

Covers and usability. Zoommii also helped me answer a question I have been struggling toward for some time but never fully worked out for myself: What are covers good for?

If you had asked me a month ago, I would have mentioned Gardnerian “Theory of multiple intelligences,” and the contrast between visual learners and those who do better with text. This concept has a lot of relevance in my own life.** And I would have mentioned how covers were a great way to browse other people’s library.

The truth is, I think, much more simple:

Covers are great for recognition, because visual memory is faster than reading.
Covers are terrible for discovery, because reading covers, with all their different typefaces and layouts, is slower than reading words.

Transferred to web design, these are fundamentally uability principles, and for the bookstore or OPAC developer up there with any overbroad dictum of Jacob Nielsen—not the full story, but a good rule-of-thumb and starting-point.

In retrospect, this patterns can be seen all over LibraryThing. On the new home page, your recently-added books are shown as covers because you are expected to recognize them at sight, but recommended books are in list format by default, because you probably aren’t familiar with them. This principle also solves why list and cover view are both useful. Cover view is, in particular, a great way to scope out someone else’s library quickly—when you’re looking for commonality, not making a detailed assessment.

Obvious as this discovery is in retrospect—and you may have known it all along—I think it was worth spellng out carefully. In my estimation, bookstores and online library catalogs lack a clear rationale for when covers should be used and when they shouldn’t. Often the idea seems to be that covers add “panache,” which to some extent they do.

But there are some deeper principles at work in the decision to use covers, and the decision to put them on virtual shelves.

*In this vein there’s a good deal to be said from David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. In Weinberger-ian terms, Zoomii is a throwback to the “first order of order.” Incidentally, for a quick fly-by of both Shirky and Weinberger, check out Mike Wesch’s Information R/evolution.

**Although obviously a reader, I am an unusual visual person. I learned this when in a group of graduate students preparing to take Latin. We all took a standard learning-styles test so that we understood the idea. The class was perfectly split between visual and textual learners—the archaeologists were visual, the philologists textual. Except for me. I showed up on the visual side. It was a revelation to me because I couldn’t even understand my fellow philologists. Confronted with the task of navigating to an unknown place and offered a choice between a map and a set of directions these people chose the directions? Were they insane?

Labels: book covers, clay shirky, david weinberger, jacob nielsen, usability, zoomii

Covers from Google: Too good to be true?

I created this cover (well except for van Gogh’s contribution). You may use it!

A few months ago when the Google Book Search API came out, I was among the first notice that GBS covers could be used to deck-out library catalogs (OPACs) with covers, potentially bypassing other providers, like Amazon and Syndetics. I subsequently promoted the idea loudly on a Talis podcast, where a Google representative ducked licensing questions, giving what seemed like tacit approval.

It seemed so great–free covers for all. Unfortunately, it now seems that it was too good to be true. At a minimum, the whole thing is thrown into confusion.

After some delay, Google has now posted–for the first time–a “Terms of Use” for the Google Book Search API (http://code.google.com/apis/books/terms.html). If you’re planning to use GBS data, you should be sure to read it.

The back story is an interesting one. Soon after I wrote and spoke about the covers opportunity, a major cover supplier contacted me. They were miffed at me, and at Google. Apparently a large percentage of the Google covers were, in fact, licensed to Google by them. They never intended this to be a “back door” to their covers, undermining their core business. It was up to Google to protect their content appropriately, something they did not do. For starters, the GBS API appears to have gone live without any Terms of Service beyond the site-wide ones. The new Terms of Service is, I gather, the fruit of this situation.

Now, I am not a lawyer and I am not a reporter. I don’t know who, if anyone, messed up. Nor do I fully understand what the new Terms of Service requires or allows. Although I am told they put the kibosh on using GBS as a replacement for other cover providers, I can’t find a straightforward prohibition on using GBS for covers, primarily or secondarily. But it starts out with the statement that:

“The Google Book Search API is not intended to be a substitute or replacement of products or services of any third party content provider.”

And there are other concerning clauses. There is a vague bullet about not posting content that infringes any other parties’ “proprietary rights.” And there are clauses that should give pause to many on the library-tech listservs–about not reordering results, not crawling, not caching, and so forth.

My interest in free data is well known. I think the days of selling covers—something publishers give out for free—are passing away. But if this happens, it must be done fairly. Those who provide proprietary data should be able to protect it, at least as far the law allows them to. (Since no data suppier can “copyright” their cover images, any restrictions must be based in licenses.*) Those of us who argue for free data** must respect this. That’s the difference between “free as in freedom” and “free as in ‘fell of a truck.'”

Meanwhile, being among the most vocal proponents of using GBS for covers—and having no idea the covers’ weren’t Google’s to do with what they pleased—I have been asked to sensitize librarians that “some of this content is licensed and they need to be respectful of infringement issues.”

So, that’s the word. Now if I only understood it.

*And, I gather, there is some doubt about “posted” licenses on publicly-available websites, as opposed to licenses that require explicit agreement. By the way, did you know that, by reading this, you’ve agreed to dance on the table like a damn fool next time you hear the Gypsy Kings? Do not disregard this license. We’ll know.
**At least those who believe in the right of contract or property.

Labels: book covers, google book search

Covers: Better, Bigger, Blanks, Defaults and Statistics

Casual visitors are often surprised to learn that LibraryThing members have contributed more than 800,000 covers, for use when Amazon doesn’t have the right cover. It’s time to make the most of this strength!

I’ve added a five new features related to how LibraryThing handles covers. I hope you like the changes!

Choose member-created “blank” covers for every book.
Choose your default cover.
Better cover “guessing”
Cover Statistics and links to different cover types.
Member-contributed covers now available in all sizes.
Member-contributed covers now available in maximum quality.

Choose member-created “blank” covers for every book. Way back in November, I asked for members to send in images of blank covers–real, doctored and built from scratch–for books that have no other cover (see post and follow-up). More than a dozen members sent covers, often very many and beautiful. These covers are now available from the “change cover” page of every book. They vary from ordinary to fanciful, general or tailored to look like a specific publisher’s books. They’re a blast. Go crazy.

It’s hard to understate the care that some members lavish on projects like this, exercising their creative side and helping other members out. Check out the image credits, available under the display and when you roll over the images.

Choose your default cover. The same member-covers are also available as default covers, the cover you get when you have no other cover. You can change your default cover from every book’s change-cover page, as well as from your Cover Statistics.

Better cover “guessing”. This feature caused some members consternation when it was released provisionally a few days ago. Suddenly members got a whole bunch of new covers, some of which they didn’t want, with no way to opt out. I’ve added powerful opt-out options, so it’s time to reintroduce the feature.

The feature takes advantage of LibraryThing’s 800,000 member-uplaoded covers. If you have books from more than a few years ago, like I do, a lot of your books don’t have Amazon covers. Before now, you could choose these covers manually, replacing our “blank” cover with your own or someone else’s uploaded cover.

Now were taking that data—the covers people choose for a given ISBN—to “guess” at the covers for coverless books. In general, members choose the right cover for their edition, especially when LibraryThing can look at many members’ decisions. In the case of my books, LibraryThing found 69 covers. Only one is dead-wrong, with two others being subtle variants of the cover I have. Of course, you can easily switch to a different cover, a blank cover or no cover.

Cover Statistics and links to different cover types. I’ve added a page for Cover Statistics. It shows where all you covers come from, with a link to all the books in that category. It’s a great way to go through your blanks or confirm LibraryThing’s new “best guess” covers.

The Cover Statistics page also has a link to change your default cover. (In case you’re wondering, I’m working on a all-encompassing “preferences” page. One thing at a time.)

Member-contributed covers now available in all sizes. Until now, LibraryThing only displayed two sizes for member-contributed covers–tiny and medium. For the last eight months we’ve been saving large versions, but we didn’t use them. Storing all the sizes or making them on the fly scared us.

A new server and some technical changes have given us the opportunity to show covers at whateve size they’re needed. The result is a much more attractive and even Cover View, which scales from teeny to upsettingly large (see image).

Member-contributed covers now available in maximum quality. As said, we were not previously taking advantage of original images, but only two presized versions. Although early-on we didn’t store them—server space was just too dear—we have been storing original versions for about eight months. This amounts to some 300,000 out of 800,000 covers. (Of course, not all “originals” are actually large; some are thumbnails.)

The result is that some member-contributed covers can now be sized to elephantine dimensions within your catalog, and look great on work pages, which use medium-large images. Unfortunately, some covers look a bit “pixelated” at these large sizes. The examples below illustrate both effects:

A final word. I want to thank members who pushed me on this feature. Although the general change has been planned for some time, it received impetus from a “bug fix” that introduced many best-guess covers. Without an easy way to “opt-out” of guesses—without choosing another cover—a few members went bananas.

The were right to do so! It created a weird situation, one I realized the more when I spent an hour “gardening” my covers. Once again, it was a pleasure to work through the issue with members. I’ve very pleased with the feedback, and as I rolled out some of these features over the weekend.

Maybe some day I’ll write a book about working with and for you guys. But you’re doing the cover.

Labels: book covers, new feature, new features

Headless body in topless bar*

I love book covers; I designed one of my wife‘s—not the best, but it broke a long publisher/author stalemate—and marveled as the rest went by. Cover design is a dark art. The right cover is crucial to the success of a novel, but designers can’t afford to spend too much time or money on them, and seek safety in herds.

Book Cannibal has a funny piece on The Mystery of the Decapitated Cover Models, “There are certain trends in publishing that baffle me. … [W]hat’s with all these covers that feature half of some girl’s face?” They start with the Gossip Girl books, but they’re everywhere, including LibraryThing author Elizabeth Bear‘s novels.

Book Cannibal wonders about the phenomenon, providing one good explanations, via her editor:

“The editor explained that B&N wants covers with live models (as opposed to scenery, or abstract painting, or an icon). Sometimes, the models aren’t quite the right age (I’m guessing this is the case re: Gossip Girls), but if you cut off part of their face, voila! Youth. You can slice away the years.”

Readers provide some others. I’m minded to look a few years back, when feet and shoes were all the rage, as Trashionista reminds us (see also GalleyCat’s dissection). First it was just feet, now we’re up to the jaw. This is progress, I suppose.

Anyway, I spent an enjoyable hour surfing book covers. This ended in 20 minutes of uncontrollable laughting at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, including this cover, with the nice observation “Why is the executive wearing a prep school jacket?”

*Famous New York Post headline, also the title of a book subtitled “The Best Headlines from Americas Favorite Newspaper.”

Labels: book covers, fun

Cool member covers rolling in

Two days ago I asked members to send us alternate “default covers” and the covers are rolling in, even though I neglected to say how. We love all of them—they’re excellent. It’s going to be hard to pick winners.

How to send more: Since the files are big, there’s no easy way to post them; send to my email, tim@librarything.com.

theAshLad3

Greyhead

Mark

From cckelly

peterp6

Image:book-cover-violet.jpg Image:book-cover-black.jpg Image:book-cover-brown.jpg Image:book-cover-blue.jpg Image:book-cover-green.jpg Image:book-cover-red.jpg

My original cover

Labels: book covers, contests