shelf-like display of the covers of the book in a collection

[foice]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

This sounds like a great opportunity to install Windows XP and make use of its ability to drag files around into an arbitrary order. You don't even have to line up the icons in a grid, so you can get an optimal simulation of disorganised stacks of books in random spots on the floor!

what is not to love in a bit of disorder every now and then?

[Quoth]

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.

…

Of course it could generate random spine images and slap the title/author on them.

…
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?

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

[Sirtel]

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.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by foice

"missing" yes, willing to go back entirely ... no.

I do not see the point of making these arguments. E-books are more flexible, it's a fact. Now, precisely because they are more flexible in software, I think it is reasonable to ask a _software_ feature about their sorting and organization.

I see little to no value in being able to display ebook covers in a random order. I always tried to keep my physical books sorted by author/series/title (I had about 1,800 hardcovers and 5,000 paperbacks). For me, calibre's current display options are more than acceptable. Given that my physical library organization always had the spine facing out, the information visible was pretty much what I see in the main library view in calibre though organized horizontally rather than vertically.

With 14,900 ebooks in my main calibre library, I need to be able to sort and search to keep track of what I already own. Even with my XYL's library of ~2500 books, I find that quite often that an ebook she expresses interest in was already obtained a few years back since so many free/0.99 ebook offers are recycled pretty regularly when the author produces a new ebook in a series.

Aside from anything else, I suspect that you would have to fork calibre and create your own code to display books in a random order and with a spine view. From Kovid Goyal's previous posts, he has little interest or time to work on such requests. Perhaps you could add a little windows with an image of a night table with your current reads and soon to be reads stacked on it?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by foice

Thanks for sharing this. I will definitively use at least a few of these columns. For context, I wish I said that at the beginning, my goal is mostly sorting the most recent books I acquired to then decide what to read next. Thus my sorting is for a limited number of books (10 or so) from a varied group of authors/topics ... Ranking these books in a column "ReadNextScore" seems promising to not miss that one book I have got since a bit longer and do not want to forget ...

calibre is quite capable of allowing you to use a custom column for 'ReadNextScore' which would be sortable. Filling that column would be left to the user.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by foice

Ranking these books in a column "ReadNextScore" seems promising to not miss that one book I have got since a bit longer and do not want to forget ...

What's stopping you from creating a custom column like that, filling it with values for only those 10 books and sorting by that column? No need for manual dragging. Anything can be done with a saved search, tag or a custom column.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by foice

I am shocked by how much you guys argue for the simple fact that I have said that I miss anything at all of physical books.

Unfortunately you're far from the first person to tell us how much they miss physical books. After the 5th, 10th or 15th time it's getting somewhat irritating.

Then again, we argue about many, many other things besides paper vs digital. Some of us even participate in the politics & religion forum which exists only for arguing.

[Katja_hbg]

@foice

It sounds like you try to keep an eye on books to read next. Did you have a look into the plugin Reading List
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=134856

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

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

I think Alfa is a pointless & inferior application for ebooks.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Quoth

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

Originally Posted by Sirtel

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!

[Quoth]

However the standard spreadsheet like list view of calibre, as has been pointed out, is essentially a non-graphical spine + extra info view on it's side, which is easier to read than vertical spines. Allows more information and books and loads of sort criteria including most recently added, most recently modified, tags, series and optional reading status, priority, collections, etc as desired.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Quoth

However the standard spreadsheet like list view of calibre, as has been pointed out, is essentially a non-graphical spine + extra info view on it's side, which is easier to read than vertical spines. Allows more information and books and loads of sort criteria including most recently added, most recently modified, tags, series and optional reading status, priority, collections, etc as desired.

But it doesn't look pretty!

OTOH, I don't get such a crick in my neck from reading sideways anymore.

On the gripping hand, it would be quite cute to have a spines view similar to the coverflow view.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

But it doesn't look pretty!

OTOH, I don't get such a crick in my neck from reading sideways anymore.

On the gripping hand, it would be quite cute to have a spines view similar to the coverflow view.

All true. We could have it horizontal or vertical by user choice.


I've a Motie related book on the TBR pile. At least I think it is. Rooks have a gripping hand, but it looks like a beak to me.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

But it doesn't look pretty!

OTOH, I don't get such a crick in my neck from reading sideways anymore.

Walking out to my CD / DVD / Blueray Ikea shelves... OMG no standards.
Crick Left for some. Crick Right for others. What is totally absurd is some were the same series or film house.

My paperbacks are the same way.

Thinking about some of the books I read in the 50's, I think most had the text horizontal across the top of the spine (not the dust jacket)

[John F]

Originally Posted by theducks

Walking out to my CD / DVD / Blueray Ikea shelves... OMG no standards.
Crick Left for some. Crick Right for others. What is totally absurd is some were the same series or film house.

...

Interesting. Looking quickly at my CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray, they are almost all crick right. I only noticed one CD that was no crick. Maybe it is a locale thing, I don't buy many imports.