Judging an Ebook by its Cover

September 12, 2014

It doesn’t matter if a book is paper or pixels: Covers matter. We are drawn to images, and the brighter and more appealing the image, the more briskly the book circulates.

But there’s a problem. For many public domain, Creative Commons, and self-published works, no image is available. And so libraries sometimes use totally generic covers—the title of the book with a book or film icon to indicate format, for instance.

But it’s boring and works against the discovery of appealing titles.

In an intriguing piece called Generative eBook Covers, Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga of New York Public Library (NYPL) Labs presents some code to spruce things up a little. It’s a team effort: “On the technical side, Leonard Richardson [application developer] is doing all the back end magic, consolidating multiple data sources for each book into a single concise format: title, author, book cover, and description. John Nowak [application developer] is writing the code of the app itself (that you will be able to download to your phone).” Arteaga himself is doing the design (and writing blog posts). The goal is a homegrown ebook borrowing and reading app.

Take a look at the blog: The image samples may not be on a par with a uniquely crafted cover by a talented designer, but they’re pretty good, and worlds better than the generic alternative.

One of the things some libraries really got good at was the display of print. We’re having to learn the same lessons all over again with digital content. Kudos to the Labs for coming up with an automated solution to a real problem.

JAMES LARUE writes, speaks, and consults about the future of libraries. He can be reached at jlarue@jlarue.com