Cory Doctorow Wants Covers to Roam Free

If you blog about books (or write about them online in any other form), you've run into the problem of finding useful cover images to illustrate your posts. Google Image Search is usually pretty good, but throws up a lot of noise with the signal (especially if the book or author name contain common words). The various Amazons are OK, but lots of their cover images have their "Search Inside" graphic pasted on top, and even those that don't usually have a white border added to the actual cover, which can be ugly and noticeable when you stick it on your blog post. (Yes, you can edit it out -- and I have, a number of times -- but that's yet one more step, which takes time and effort.)

I personally use BN.com -- they don't have extra stuff pasted on their bookshots, or borders I need to delete -- but they don't have everything. (Old books are the biggest problem, though I don't imagine most bookbloggers are reviewing old paperbacks the way I do.)

Cory Doctorow has been thinking about this problem, and he has a solution. It's simple, elegant, and could be implemented immediately: every publisher that wants to could create a "/covers" directory at the top level of their sites, stick high-rez PNGs (or JPGs) of their cover art there, in files named with the books' ISBNs, and make sure the metadata flows out to search engines.

The comments on his post are also interesting, though some of the objections seem trivially wrong to me. (For example, if the publisher is already providing an ONIX feed to online bookstores, there's already a web-ready version of the cover being disseminated -- I very much doubt any sizable publisher is failing to buy the rights to do what all publishers are already doing.)

And, of course, those images don't need to be in precisely the directory Doctorow suggests -- the important thing is that they're posted, publicly accessible, and indexed by major searchers. The possible existence of a worldwide database of all covers, or a dedicated cover-search function, would be nice but isn't necessary.

Really, I bet these images are nearly all already on the web somewhere -- it's really just a question of linking or spidering them, so that they can be found more easily.