Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
Metadata can usually be found on the net. How is a library manager supposed to generate true images of book spines, with the same color as the cover, and thickness matching the length of the book? By magic? Because such an image doesn't usually exist anywhere, not in the book, not in the metadata, not on the publisher's website, so the program can't just extract it.
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Of course it could generate random spine images and slap the title/author on them.
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or to write the necessary code for extracting the color and style of the cover + the length of the book (word count?) from the metadata and converting that information to a picture of an imaginary spine. This last doesn't sound too hard now, does it?
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I like this idea.
Use the word count, a few sizes of page and a few sizes of font (both random selection from a small list, or manually chosen to estimate number of pages and thus spine, assuming common paper weight. Boring if all the books the same height.
A estimate can be made of dominant colour of spine. Only thicker books have the cover continued to spine or an illustrated spine. A part of cover could be used. Thinner books have a solid colour spine and often black, white or outlined title and author. There could be a database of publisher logos pointing at image files.
Series info can be used to add a digit.
Then a pleasing fully automatic spine cane be generated. There also could be a Spine Designer/Editor like existing Cover Designer, with option to pick background, text and outline colours from the existing cover and to optionally copy a slice as a background image from cover or load an image from file. Option to crop a logo from a cover and save it as a Publisher Logo for all that publisher's books.
People can just let it automatically do the spines and only manually intervene on books they actually have on paper, or favourites or whatever.
Much more like typical library shelves than "cover view" grids.
I might use it. Hover on a spine to see all the metadata. More use than a so called 3D view. My shelves look pretty 2D unless there is a load of empty space and I look at an angle.
Years ago I might have written this, but I'm only offering to test it and refine the spec before someone else codes it!
Edit:
All royalties for use to the
Estonian-Irish Book Shelving Foundation, that coincidently is just about to be formed
