Members covers on Author or Series Page

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Members covers on Author or Series Page

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1Keeline
Jul 26, 2016, 11:15 am

As a collector who puts some effort to curate a collection of books with nice condition vintage copies of books, it is frustrating to see the Series pages and Author pages feature the "most popular" cover. For my older series, this is often some generic fake cover image instead of a real published book cover. These fakes are generated by the likes of eBook or print-on-demand publishers and even Amazon when they have not bothered to find a vintage copy of a book they wish to distribute or sell.

To illustrate, here is a portion of the Great Marvel series page as seen under my account with check marks for the titles I have but with the generic or other "most popular" covers.



These are the covers from my collection (some duplicates):



This is also a problem on series like the The Rover Boys or Tom Swift where the series is longer and there are more generic covers being used as the "most popular" cover.

Looking at it today, there are fewer of the generics than I have seen in the past but they are still not my covers with the dust jackets and earliest cover designs.

_____

So, if it was possible to get the member's book cover image that comes up for each work in the series list, could it be shown in place of the "most popular" image?

In my manual tests, there was an undesirable latency in pulling up the work page in a new tab. Perhaps the LT network is filled up with Pokemon Go traffic.

For performance it might be well to allow the feature to be toggled on or off. Bonus points if this could be done by series (or author) page. Some authors or series are very long and going through 100 or more items could be prohibitive.

Since the collection does not change a lot, it might be well to build a single image of the covers periodically and pull that to use instead of the "most popular" images. This could be pulled from a server and updated periodically or on demand. Perhaps this would lessen the need to pull each book cover image.

For those who are familiar with TamperMonkey / Greasemonkey scripts, how hard would this be? Is it a project you'd care to take on?

I know PHP and some JS/JQ but probably not enough to pull this off with success myself since I am still trying to understand the scripts that I presently use here on LT, let alone make a new one.

James

2omargosh
Jul 26, 2016, 12:02 pm

I think it's possible, but not exactly the easiest script to make, and I personally don't currently have time to dedicate to it.

I see potential two ways to make it. The easier way, but more resource-intensive and slow one, would be to do an XMLHttpRequest on each of the book pages, grab the cover URL from the result, and replace it on the series page.

What would probably the "right" way to do it would be to use one of LT's APIs to fetch the URL of the cover for that specific book, then do the replacement.??? After looking around at the APIs for a bit, I actually didn't see something for returning specific book data, but rather user's library data as a whole (which does seem to include cover URLs), or stuff related to ISBNs and work-level data. Perhaps I missed it though.

Adding to the complexity would be the "see all" link part. In general, I would think it would be much easier server-side, but of course I wouldn't hold my breath.