On singleton "book covers" for LT.

Dear Group,

I was wondering how many LT members make a effort to scan their
unique books "book covers" for LT.
I find myself looking thru my "oners" and after I can't combine, saying
to myself, "I must put up that cover 'cos no one else will..." and then
of course promptly forgetting about it.

I suppose that also applies to an old or obscure version of a book
(even though it is owned by many LT'ers) which doesn't have YOUR cover.

Just an idle thought at 4am in the morning.

Guido.

I always scan my unique books, otherwise my "library" looks too patchy, and that *bothers* me. I try to do it fairly regularly before the ugly fill-in covers fall off the front page. Unless my book has a boring cover in one of the solid colours provided by LT, of course.

Which reminds me to upload three unique covers and try to keep an eye out for a fourth book that needs to be scanned!

I do when I'm adding a book. It's the ones I catalogued before we had the ability to upload our own images that I'm behind on. Every so often, I get the urge, and start scanning and uploading, but it is work.

I would do more of mine, except my scanner has randomly started creating .tiff files, or some other random format, and i have no way of converting them.

Dear Ghost et. al. #5,

May I direct you to "Paint.Net" a freeware program. If they ask you for money,
get out of there. I have used this programme ahead of Painter (for which I
paid $400) for several years!

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/PaintNET/1096481993/1

If this site isn't OK, just Google "paint.net" and you will find a download site.

It does do some graphic file conversions etc...

My first question would be is it mac compatible?

Do you know Deus..." I have NO IDEA!"

Perhaps you might find this out for me.

I have been promulgating that bit of "freeware" for quite a while and have NEVER thought about that.

I had another look at that site BUT couldn't find any specific references to Apple.

Obviously I DO like that programme. $400 vs. $0 isn't the only reason!

Guido.

edited for typo.

One of these days I'll get a scanner and do mine too. And review them. And sort out my tags. And... all those other housekeeping jobs I never find time for.

>7 DeusExLibrus: From the Paint.net site: "Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows."

The BEST covers are usually the older more obscure titles. I revel in their beauty and of course want to share them/boast. I tag the special ones "cover" in my collections if you're interested in looking.

I've got an excellent image manipulation program that allows me to tweak the picture so that the image looks better than the original sometimes, and allows me to save in a dozen different formats, but I've never noticed what the program is.

There is an art to mainpulating the raw picture so that it looks good once uploaded. I'll probably go back and re-do some of my early up-loads in the future, as I've gotten much better at it.

You have some wonderful old books, 2wonderY. Thank you for entering the covers; it's a pleasure to see them. I agree that the best covers are from those older books. I have a bunch in my library too, tagged "handsome bindings", but alas, there are maybe 8 of them i haven't scanned yet, due to my love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationships with Photobucket and Flickr. And the fact that my scanner is usually covered with heaps of unshelved books.

I have in the past scanned in many of the covers for some of my older weaving and needlework books, as well as for most of my collection of The Night Before Christmas books, which I collect for their illustrations.

I'm always pleased to see member-uploaded covers from other LTers, especially when one matches a book that I have!

I looked at the program that gives me such versatility - It's Microsoft Office Picture Manager from Microsoft Works 2007. I can choose the format, re-size, and manipulate color, brightness and contrast.

I just experimented by right clicking someone elses uploaded picture and I can clean it up too, making it brighter and easier to see, and then saving it for my library. Very cool.

I wish I could clean up the real book with such ease.

@ 5 and 7. If you can't make the save settings from your scanning software behave, you could probably use "Preview" to convert to jpg. It installs with your OSX operating system. If you need a full-featured photo editor for the Mac without breaking the bank "Gimp" is pretty well regarded and is FREE!

From the beginning of my time on LT, I have been rather obsessive about having to have each of my book listings include an image of the actual cover of the book I own. If that cover already exists on the site in a clear enough jpg, so much the better. Otherwise, crank up the scanner! I have a lot of relatively uncommon books. If I add a book that is listed by only one other LT member and they don't have a cover jpg, I'll usually send them a message letting them know I've loaded on a cover jpg. Some people care, others don't. C'est la vie.

I would love to have a feature whereby one could automatically send a group message to everyone who lists a particular book on LT for those cases when I'm the first to upload a cover for a book listed by 6 or 7 members, but I suppose that might get a bit cumbersome for the classics.

For some of older books without dust jackets, the cover of the book itself is sometimes quite nondescript, or else the title/author has been worn away, making a scan basically useless. In these cases, I will scan, crop and upload the book's title page instead.

Title page, that's an interesting thought. I usually just choose the generic cover which is closest in colour, unless someone has uploaded an image I fancy.

Dear Rocketjk.

I am not sure that I totally agree with you re. using the "books title Page"
as an ID. for "older/unknown" books.
I do though agree with your suggestion re. "notification", but that sort of thing is always 2 weeks away. :-)

Guido.

Shhh! We'll get in trouble for using title pages.

I tag books that I want to scan and then periodically print off the list as a reminder to bring them to the scanner.

#18> Get in trouble? Why? Again, I only do that when my copy of a particular book a) has no dust jacket and b) the cover is just a solid color with no or very worn away/faded wording that is not worth scanning. So generally we are talking about very old books, a vast majority of which are in the public domain.

I guess I'm just skittish, as I've had a steep learning curve about uploading author images, even from very old books.

I scan title page as well, when there's nothing better.

Here's one I'm particularly fond of though;
http://www.librarything.com/work/51658/details/58515806

It was printed in 1726, and in typeset, tells who the book was printed for..

#20> Very cool!