Publishers and authors want libraries and bookstores to show their covers. Not surprisingly many libraries and bookstores skip covers, or paste them in manually from publisher sites. They too are probably, on average, better. Meanwhile, there are a number of commercial cover providers. Recent changes in Amazon’s Terms of Service have deepened this worry.

But libraries and small bookstores have been understandably wary about linking to Amazon. If you’re trying to make money from Amazon Affiliates, this is a good thing. The catch is that Amazon’s Terms of Service require a link-back. By changing the URL you can do amazing things to Amazon covers. They have far more covers, and no limit on the number of requests. Amazon’s service is, quite simply, better. This service “competes” with Amazons cover service, now part of Amazon Web Services. Why are you doing this? The goal is half promotional and half humanitarian.įirst, some background. This is sometimes about original files and sometimes about our resizing routines.

Some covers are blurrier than we’d like, particularly at the “large” size.

Accuracy isn’t guaranteed–this is user data–and coverage varies.

At present only about 913,000 covers are accessible, the others being non-ISBN covers.

You will note that unlike the new API to our Common Knowledge data, you are not required to link back to LibraryThing.

If covers are fetched through an automatic process (eg., not by people hitting a web page), you may not fetch more than one cover per second.

Use does not involve or promote a LibraryThing competitor.

But you may cache bulk quantities of covers.

You do not make LibraryThing cover images available to others in bulk.You also agree to some very limited terms: We encourage you to cache the files locally. In fact, we only count it when a cover is made from the original, o our actual limit will be much higher.

This puts a top limit on the number of covers you can retrieve per day-currently 1,000 covers. The Catch? To get covers, you’ll need a LibraryThing Developer Key-any member can get one. If we have it, it shows if we don’t, it doesn’t. So you can put the cover-image on OPAC pages without knowing if we have the image. Just replace “medium” with “small” or “large.”Īs with Amazon, if we don’t have a cover for the book, we return a transparent 1×1 pixel GIF image.

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