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This season's fashion in book covers

Publisher's Weekly has a very nice piece by Elizabeth Bluemle on this season's fashion in book covers.

I’m so curious about how book-jacket trends develop. It’s probably just something in the zeitgeist that brings a whole season of, say, close-ups of hands or stripey socks and tennis shoes or flowers illuminated as if shot on a lightbox. Or close-ups of girls’ faces, or face parts, or the backs of teenagers’ heads, or blue-jeaned hips. Or, for that matter, entire herds of dustcovers with photos of dramatically lit girls framed by dark foliage or fabric.

Bluemle imagines this as a runway show; this is the "modern girls in period costumes" theme.

Thanks to John Weise of Books By Chance for the link.

On fair use, book covers, libraries and the law

Regular readers of this blog will know that I've done a few library mashups using book cover images to add to the usefulness of services provided by my library.  Depending on the task, I've either used a supply of cover art provided by Syndetics (a Bowker company) or cover images provided by Amazon.  LibraryThing also has a good sized supply of cover art, though it's a bit trickier to use it wholesale.

For the most part I rationalized using these images either by somehow contriving that the Syndetics ones were OK to use because they were used as part of a view into the Ann Arbor District Library's catalog (and AADL uses them), or because they are within the rules as best I understood them from Amazon.  Mostly though these projects were one-offs and not ongoing commercial projects for gain.  And I rationalized it because it was, well, fun, and unlikely to get anyone upset.

Mary Minow tackles the question of the legality of the use of cover image art by libraries in the LibraryLaw Blog. She examines the relevant bits of the law - the Fair Use bit of the Copyright Act, and the "useful article" test.  Quoting now:

However, there's another copyright exception that could be useful here -- the "useful article" provision at 17 USC 113(c) which states:

In the case of a work lawfully reproduced in useful articles that have been offered for sale or other distribution to the public, copyright does not include any right to prevent the making, distribution, or display of pictures or photographs of such articles in connection with advertisements or commentaries related to the distribution or display of such articles, or in connection with news reports.

and 17 USC 101 defines "useful article" as:

A “useful article” is an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. An article that is normally a part of a useful article is considered a “useful article”

Assuming the books are "useful articles" it seems that Sect. 113 is more helpful than Fair Use. It seems that a strong argument can be made that with today's enhanced online catalogs that include book reviews, the commentary criteria is met. For items that do not have reviews attached, there is still a possible argument that the pictures are used to help advertise the book. 

The discussion is more nuanced than I'm able to take in, and I'm reminded by this analysis by Carol Shepherd of the decision in the Harry Potter Lexicon case that fair use has an overwhelmingly complex set of legal nuances, some of which hinge on terms like a "transformative use" which in turn have big swaths of case law behind them where the very particular details of the circumstances are material to the decision.  The Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center notes

So what is a "transformative" use? If this definition seems ambiguous or vague, be aware that millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent attempting to define what qualifies as a fair use. There are no hard-and-fast rules, only general rules and varying court decisions. That's because the judges and lawmakers who created the fair use exception did not want to limit the definition of fair use. They wanted it--like free speech--to have an expansive meaning that could be open to interpretation.

So who owns the copyright to the cover of a book, and who has the right to use this image to advertise or promote the book or to use it for commentary or criticism?  Mary Minow notes that she and Peter Hirtle of Cornell have been looking at this issue for some years and would welcome commentary. 

innovations in library book cover tagging

The usual complaint about how libraries mark up books to go on the shelves is that the call number is not very meaningful, not very legible, and hides some actual useful information about the book like the author or the publisher. Since libraries often shelve spine-out, these are real considerations in making the stacks browsable.

Lou Rosenfeld sends this account of informational book labels from the Information Aesthetics weblog, which in turn refers to the original Valerie Madill project: looking at libraries: defining space through content .

Read it! because you have no idea what you are dealing with. (there are many details and considerations involved in this project, one would likely experience and notice them using the system in a real life situation. However, this is a website, allow me to enlighten you) Senior grad project at the Emiliy Carr University under the supervision of professor Sandra Hoffmann Robbiani.

The spine labels for the library are designed for the library function, not the bookstore function: they have bright, clear, uniform type, they are color coded per the classification scheme (so that books in QA are all bright orange), and everything that would have been on the old catalog card is printed on the side.

Practical for actual use? Hard to know. Possible for home library? Oh certainly.

The Librarian (1947) - on searching for books by the color of the cover

from the Internet Archive, the instructional film "The Librarian" from 1947, showing the career track and illustrating typical patron behavior.

noted from the comments:

Man: "I'm looking for a book on Television:
Librarian: "Do you know the name of it?"
Man: "I Forget. i know it's a blue book, and it's on television."
Librarian: "I think I can help you!"

just so you don't think this is an isolated case, here's a forum post from 6 months ago on a similar search:

hi all

can anyone tell what album this is?

i saw a advert for a dance album liked the songs on it, it has a blueish cover its a new one only just out
problem is i forgot what the album it is
i dont watch much telly so wont see the advert for a while

the more things change...

more book covers (as art and inspiration)

Smashing Magazine has a piece on Excellent Book Covers and Paperbacks.  They write

Book covers are hard to design and nice to look at. An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page. However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way. That’s not that different from Web where it’s important to build a sound information architecture upon a rather restricted design layout.

The reward is a collection of 61 covers as an example of the art - and not just tiny little versions of them, but nice big scans and photos of actual books, imperfections and creases and price tags and all.

The Everywhere Girl, PixID, and identifying common book cover elements

The Everywhere Girl is a woman who was in a stock photography shoot whose image started showing up everywhere that someone needed a college student. One of these places is book covers. (Another was the home pages of both Dell and HP, simultaneously, much to their dismay.

The folks at Idée have trained their PixID image recognition software on a set of book covers and come up with a great post showing everywhere the Everywhere Girl has appeared on a book cover. It's a nice walk through book cover design, showing how many layers of imagery go onto the front of the book.

coverflow and interactive visual displays of images representing texts

On Tame the Web, Kyle has written a good roundup of library user interfaces based on Apple's "coverflow" style image browser. As always, the key observation is that book designers and publishers put a lot of effort into making the cover of a book be something to make you understand what's inside the book, and browsing displays that take advantage of that can be super effective in helping you sift through new materials quickly.

One thing I observed in looking at the coverflow based interfaces compared to the other page by page book browsing tools e.g. Google Books is the difference in direction and orientation that the systems have. With many online text tools, the assumption is that you are reading from an infinite scroll top to bottom, and that the page extends forever down. The coverflow world gives you that same sense of infinite possibility left to right. Somehow that change in orientation makes it that much more familiar to grasp, and I'm not sure why.

New knitting books at the Ann Arbor District Library!

In the "wall of books" tradition, here's the current list of AADL knitting books, with covers of the last 100 acquired going back about a year. Warning! This page may load slowly.

As always, covers generate ideas for books to check out - in this case I put on hold Julie Jersild Roth's Knitting Nell

Everywhere Nell goes, she works on her knitting, quietly observing life around her, until one day she enters one of her creations in the county fair, and receives rewards beyond her dreams.

The very tiny shell script that generates this turns RSS records into links to AADL books with images stored on the Syndetics site; it would be a small matter of programming to also sync this up with Amazon images or your favorite online bookstore.

Things I want to write more about here - categories A-G

Every so often I run into corners of the world that I want to explore. Here's some list of the things I'd like to write more about, even if I don't have a full blog-length posting for any of them written right now. I'm keying off the categories I've set up.

This is part 1: Amazon through Google Book Search.

Sorry no links yet....will hyperlink as I have time to edit, but I thought I'd get this out into the world.

Amazon - about the book cover and album cover art database they have; how to set up an affiliate bookstore that actually works; on using Amazon to do wish lists that are then fulfilled through your library (via Jon Udell); on using Amazon as a book finding system and then using Book Burro or similar to connect back to your library; much more I'm sure.

Ann Arbor - plans for a new library downtown; reviews of all of the branches; reviews of other Washtenaw County libraries; special libraries in town like the Ford Presidential Library

Archives - an interview with the folks who run the Labadie Collection; an interview with the Prelingers; an interview with Brewster Kahle; some discussion of the peculiar nature of archives in the digital age

Archival Television - Jeff Ubois blog of the same name; the loss of the video record; clearing and securing rights; bootlegs on Youtube; museums of the broadcast industry

Beyond big vendors - this was the title of a talk I gave; an exploration of consolidation in the integrated library systems space, and some understanding of new alternatives

Book Burro - at least an annual post on what it is (repetition is the soul of the net); a screencast showing how I use it; documentation for online book finding system developers to get them to have Book Burro pop up on their book screens; a discussion of how tools like this can be funded by affiliate revenues

Book covers - as finding aids; variations between editions; in online book finding and book inventory systems; search by contents of the cover, not contents of the book

Book trading - more reviews of any book trading systems I find; some stories about book swap clubs that meet in person; children's birthday parties where everyone brings a book and everyone gets a book

Bookins - how they advertise new inventory on Twitter; comparison with other book swap sites; integration with LibraryThing

Books - more book reviews, lots of book reviews would be welcomed; the book publishing industry as a whole; old books; smelly books; pretty much anything is fair game.

Books sorted by color - more discussion of cover art, illustrations, other metadata about the book captured in the cover art but not indexed by typical book finding systems; the book illustration business; how covers are designed; history of binding systems; algorithms to determine which color a book is; art and photographic illustrations of installations where books have been sorted by color

Bookshelves - compact shelving, buying shelves for personal libraries, reviews of bookcases, shelving for libraries, innovations in book shelving, reviews of books about bookshelves, how to build your own, built in shelving, what to do when yours fill up

Code - more code! software that does interesting things with book and library data; mashups, data extraction, search algorithms, recommender systems, page layout, interactive design, home grown alternative views of the library

Collection development - impact of patrons on collections; controversial materials and how they are added to the collection and perhaps subtracted from the collection; metrics used for weeding and deaccessions; building your personal library from another library's discards; libraries as endangering printed materials

Electronic collections - library originated book and non-book collections; hardware, software, and systems for managing and cataloging same; preservation of digital relics; copyright, fair use and international implications of same; the proper provenance of enthusiast collectors

Events and exhibits - individual events and exhibits, and also ways by which libraries can improve their ability to bring people through the door by hosting book-themed events. Compare libraries to bookstores and see how they stack up; facilities building and planning with events in mind.

Film - libraries for film; collecting video and film; archival television (via Jeff Ubois); rights, copyrights, and the like; stock footage libraries; impact of digital distribution on the circulation patterns in public libraries that have big DVD collections

Friends Bookshop - relationships between Friends groups and libraries; examples of particularly fun bookshops; self service bookshops; using friends book inventory to do outreach; purposes of friends bookshops - to entertain people who want to run a bookstore, or to raise money, or both

Friends of the library - about national and local organizations; demographics of friends groups; "Friends of the Library, for the net"; library advocacy; when friends groups turn into haters groups

Games - games in the library; word games; something more about Eli@AADL; Wii at the library. Games in the kids room - ice cream truck. Learning from games.

Google Book Search - contracts, restrictions on use of data, inaccuracies within, quality of scanning, quality of metadata, shout out to Ben Bunnell, aftermarket greasemonkey hacks to fix issues with, comparison with Microsoft et al, comparison with Open Library, Distributed Proofreaders

Google Scholar - library use and access to, Andrew Odlyzko on open publishing, relative frequency of citation of non-internet publications, Math 40 yr history of increased collaboration via Patrick Ion, quality of data, quality of metadata, use by scholars as replacement for vita

Judge a book by its cover

from Marginal Revolution, on the practice of buying (or more generally reading or finding) books based solely on cover art:

My thought was this: presumably the publisher designs the cover to appeal to people who will spread favorable word of mouth about the book. As a sometimes good (but non-reductionist) Bayesian, if I like the cover I should infer I will praise the book. Furthermore I should be especially keen to buy on this basis for a "word of mouth book," and indeed this author does not have a celebrity name.

If I like the cover *a lot*, can I receive a worse evaluation by checking out the blurbs and thus skewing or minimizing my gut reaction to the image? Surely if someone is able to manipulate me, my optimal strategy is let just some of the manipulative information through. The case for viewing the cover -- and only the cover -- is simply that many more people see the cover than evaluate any other part or aspect of the book. Might we then not expect the cover to be the strongest and best thought out signal?

My own experience with cover art is that especially for kids books you can tell a huge amount by what you see on the cover, and even if you end up with a story that's meh you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of good art. I've picked a few choice titles out of my "wall of books" just this way - the "street sweeper" book that entranced my 2 year old was nothing I would have ever found with a text based search.

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