Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

You are what you read

We’ve always pushed the idea that your books are you. Well, now you can see yourself on a single page.

We were inspired by two very cool projects: LibraryThing author David Louis Edelman‘s post about creating photo mosaics of himself from his book covers, and a post by Adam of Tailors Today about creating a poster of every book he’s ever read.

In both cases, one of the challenges was dealing with LibraryThing’s 100-cover limit in “Cover view.” So we made a special nothing-but-the-covers page.

The new page doesn’t replace the “Cover view” in your catalog (which remains the easiest way to visually browse your library), but book cover arts and crafts projects like this will be a little easier with everything consolidated in one place.

Check it out, discuss it here and let us know if you do anything as cool as David and Adam.

Labels: 1

9 Comments:

  1. sunny says:

    @harlequinella …
    I'm having the same problem as billfl, lots of default covers. When I click on a random half dozen, they all do indeed have ISBNs. So do you have any other theories about this issue? It's a beautiful thing, this 'all my covers', but I'm not wanting to do anything with it when it has all these 'blank' covers in it.

  2. Lea says:

    I like the title of your article, this is practically true. What you read is what interest you most.

  3. dtw42 says:

    Yeah, I’m getting the same thing as sunny.

  4. Yani says:

    I'm attracted with your ideas here. I believe so, a personality can be reflected on what he's reading.

  5. Miriam says:

    Is it possible to create a cover mosaic with covers that aren't in your library but are instead the result of a tag search?

  6. Anonymous says:

    Are there any legal issues involved with the photo-mosaic portraits, i.e. permission form publishers, etc.? Did you need to get permission to use them, and what about use on t-shirts?

    [Blogger Tim said…
    We should I agree. But I wouldn't say our "core competencies" include t-shirt making. If some enterprising t-shirt maker wants to team up with us, we'd be happy. We could easily figure out how to generate a nice, direct-to-plate PDF. 1/31/2007 8:35 PM]

  7. Gravura says:

    Good article. There’s a more of good info here, though I did want to let you know something – I am running Redhat with the up-to-date beta of Firefox, and the design of your blog is kind of bizarre for me. I can read the articles, but the navigation doesn’t function so great.

  8. Monica says:

    I won’t probably ever do anything with your Covers on a Single Page — but it’s still really cool. Thanks for always thinking of the really cool.

  9. Shannon Love says:

    What’s the easiest way to download all the covers as individual pictures? Do I just have to save them one at a time?

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