Spine View

I have mentioned this before - I love spines. They are the thing we collectors see most of in our bibliophilia and yet they are seldom catered for in library or cataloguing systems.

It's how we see our own books and how we usually come across other peoples'.

I'd like to see LT support spines. So far my idea involves allowing and supporting another graphic type than cover view - spine view. I've made a few spines of my own up and substututed them for the covers so that you can see what I'm getting at. You can see it here:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?offset=50&view=papalaz&shelf=she...

This illustrates a spine view where one book has been switched to cover view for a closer look.

What do you all think?

I really like this idea. Many times, the spine is where most of the interest is! And, it is certainly the first thing you would see on your bookshelf at home...so it's the most recognizable part. :) I like the look of that cover view page. :)

Absolutely. You can see so many more books at once!

Also, I really like the J.G. Ballard and Iain Banks action...

From what Tim has said on the Google Group, I gather that as it stands most of the bandwidth for covers is coming from Amazon (the images are linked directly to Amazon, that is). But spines would all be uploaded, and thus LT's bandwidth. The images would be smaller, but I wonder if that would have an appreciable effect on the servers if every cover were coming from. Maybe we should ask Tim. :)

I forgot to say this, but yeah, I really like the idea as an option for alternate view, too. Not to mention that cover reverses would be cool. :)

I would love Love LOVE a spine view. Plus, it would render them with the correct relative heights, and if told how wide my shelves are it would break them into shelf-sized chunks ;)

If I bought a new book it would tell me which shelf to file it on, which books to put it between, and show my what they look like ;)

I can imagine that implementation of this idea might cost in terms of extra storage space rather than bandwidth but given that we would have to scan the spines ourselves then I see no reason why those of us with permanent connections and fixed IP addresses shouldn't host them in a P2P manner. Alternatively if we were each to host our own spines locally then it's a different technical challenge.

I haven't decided if I like the spine view. I agree to the association to the shelf of a library, but I can't see enough in these images to get the right feeling.

I thought about having the front cover pop up as you mouse over it. I made a quick mock up here. http://limer.homeunix.net/lt/sample.htm

If is was smoother or my like the dock in Mac OS X, it might be usable.

it would be nice if the spine view could be viewed a little larger, so we could actually read the spines. :)

I agree that the spines should both be bigger and preferably in scale so that you can differentiate the oversizes from the quartos and whatever.

Nice work on the pop-up but I personally would prefer the spine/cover transition to be an active user choice - long hover or click on

Yes, I agree that it would be great to be able to click (or long hover) and see the cover, but it's a bit distracting to always have it flitting about changing every cover as you move the mouse. :)

I also think that a spine view implementation would have to preserve scale to work nicely. I guess that means that along with a scan we would have to enter width and height in millimetres or inches. This would mean that grabbing images off the internet would be a bad idea... but who has seen book spine images on the internet anyway (-:

Another piece of metadata that it would eventually need is the direction of the text on the spine. English-only readers may not be aware that in Europe there is no standard and spine text runs randomly in either direction leading no doubt to many neck problems among book fanciers. Having the text direction data would enable options such as "show spine text bottom to top", "show spine text top to bottom", and "show spine text in natural direction".

but if we are scanning spines and they are simple images no meta data is required save perhaps height

This is an idea that we've talked about many times here at LT. I've even started throwing some code together to implement it. It just hasn't moved to the top of the list yet. I've played around with a CoverFlow-like browser also (which is actually in working order right now....just not released).

Most "big ticket" feature ideas like this one, collections, multiple sorting, wish lists, etc. have been thrown around or are even in some stage of development here at LT. It just takes time to do each one and we have a very small staff. Add in the numerous tiny bug fixes that each of us work on on a daily basis and it is hard to get "big" stuff done sometimes. But we get them out eventually.

With spines, we've had the added problem of a source for spine images. While I could certainly provide "filler" images via programming voodoo if none were provided, the overall idea could only work after we achieved a certain threshold of users that could provide spines and covers. I think we are probably at or near that point now.

Heck, we'd love to be able to drop the use of Amazon covers altogether but we can't really do that because of the casual users who would just like a cover to be there. We still have too many works that have no user-provided covers for us to do that.
Christopher Holland

It's just a hunch, but I think the number of works with no user-provided cover will drop some once ISBN- or title-combining is available (along with the number of total unique works). I think there are probably loads of works that just can't be combined because they either have no author listed, the wrong author, etc. And there's probably a user-uploaded cover on at least one of its incarnations in the LT system.

Just a thought...

Unlikely - nearly 5m books, just over 1m unique works and only 133,000 user covers.

Well, I don't expect it to be a majority of works! But if even 10,000 works that previously didn't have covers now have at least one user-uploaded cover, that's a lot of books.

It's all about helping the helpless starfish one at a time... :)

I'm with you all the way! I'd also like to be able to flip back and forth between cover view and spine view. Seems like I'd have to create a second profile so I could duplicate my list. But would that mess up stats on the site? Since I'm new to LT (joined today), I'm not familiar with all of the possibilities and limitations of the site. Lovin' it so far!

Hi masiry you might find it a bit echo-ey in here the conversation has mainly to the Reccomend site imppovements group.

Ah. Simon, do you mean no one's actually responding here? That explains the 6-month silence! Thanks for the clue. (How in the world did you happen by, then?) :)

When I first joined I also though it was live added it to my groups list and never bothered to remove it. every unread post to a group on my groups list appears in on my talk list. I suspect most people have removed it from their list but I never bothered.

SimonW11, your email to me is unreply-able...unless your edress is "noresponse@librarything.com"

23>Umm I have not emailed you. You probably have the "email comments" selection ticked in your profile. to reply to a comment go to your profile page and click on that comment's reply option.

Just butting in to say that although I have scanned some spines this is either (i) because I have a hardback with no information on the front cover and I can't be bothered creating a pseudo-cover in photoshop, or (ii) the book is very large and I've decided to scan the spine rather than stitch together two cover scans (we don't all have A3 or bigger scanners). Perhaps (tongue in cheek) the solution is to put up shelving which displays my books front face out - I've seen this in trendy magazines but I'd have to buy a bigger house to achieve this. I prefer the cover view even though as some contributors have pointed out this is not my 'normal' view for my real shelves.

Just a test.

Hi. I am a very newbie. Noting the date on this thread, I am hoping there may be an update? I am depesperate to visualize my collections by spine view with the size made true to the volume. This is because I need to edit and arrange my books as they will fit in my space. Many rooms over four floors with many shelves of different sizes and many, many oversized editions. It’s a complex task with literally thousands of books, many of which I will need to deaccession.

Has any tool become available in the past 10 years?

Nothing to speak of. We have SOME data for sizes but certainly not for every book/work in the system. Adding to that is the technical issues involved and the fact that it's sort of a "toy" feature.

In the way-back past it's the kind of project that I would have worked on in my free time (single dude with nothing else to do). Unfortunately, none of the developers really have free time anymore. (family dude with more to do than I have time for) :)

But it's an intriguing challenge so maybe I'll think about it. {fingers crossed}