Over at Boing!Boing! Cory is being very sensible. It would indeed be very useful if publishers made JPGs of all of their book covers easily available on their web sites. Somehow, however, I doubt that it will happen. When I was doing Emerald City I spent a bit of time trying to get publishers to create RSS feeds of their forthcoming titles. Everyone I spoke to said that it was impossible because they couldn’t get their IT people to do anything.
4 thoughts on “Yes, We Want Covers”
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We make JPG thumbnails available of all our covers. I should think about the suggestion of full-sized images, though.
Our website’s a Web 1.0 relic. If I want to put an RSS feed in, I’ll be hand-coding it. Which I might do, actually. It’s a good idea.
No kidding. And how annoying is it that Amazon’s replaced as many as possible of its cover images with “search inside the book” links?
David:
Fortunately B&N, Borders are Powells are not so silly. Even Amazon UK is a better source of covers.
It always amused me that part of the terms of Amazon’s associate agreement is (or at least was last time I looked) that you are not allowed to use more than a certain number of “their” cover images. The white space they put around covers, and the “search inside” also seem to be deliberate attempts to prevent people from “stealing Amazon content”. All very silly.
just another example of publishers cutting off their own noses, which they do with regularity….I suspect its worse with bigger houses, based on my own experience…