Thread: shelf-like display of the covers of the book in a collection
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Old 01-04-2024, 06:42 AM   #70
John F
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth View Post
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
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel View Post
I actually downloaded the trial version of Alfa Ebooks, to see how they do their 3-D models. I have to say the models are quite good - they even have spines! The color of the spine is based on the color of the cover and the thickness of the model is based on page numbers (which I entered manually, taken from my calibre page count). They only put the title on the spine, though, not the author, and you can't change either the font or the font color - it's the same boring white for every book.

For all this nifty modeling, even Alfa doesn't have the bookshelf view with spines - only with full covers, like Calibre.

I attached some pictures of their 3-D models.
Inconceivable!
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