1
Cover photos not always great, but I want to see more than 5 books onscreen at once
Nov 18, 2024
The choices are: a beautifully spaced-out list view where you can see at most 6 or so books at once, or a bookshelf view where you can see a front cover image that might be a bit rubbish anyway (including unreadable), and which may not necessarily match the edition you have. I want to be able to see more than five books at a time, and the bookshelf view, while it does show more, isn't very helpful. There should be ample space for a paginated view with 20-30 books visible at once. Like the Calibre ebook reader, for example.
Comments
Thinking more about cover images, as sometimes they're completely wrong, unreadable, poor quality, generic, not even photographed straight, or entirely unavailable (there's more than a few Amazon covers that are just 'Image unavailable' icons) I think I'd like to be able to switch them off entirely. Having the wrong cover for a book is even more annoying to me than having no cover at all. I'd rather track by ISBN, edition, author and title. Maybe publisher? Cover's low on the priority list for me because it's quite unreliable. I worked at a book publisher, and sorting out the right cover at good resolution for Amazon, even for our own dang books, was sometimes a right pain - because they were printed years before Amazon even existed, in Quark 2 format or goodness knows what. Or it was a physical collage, scanned in some proprietary format, or saved in Amiga Paint or something.
Similarly we probably only had author photos for maybe a third? of our authors. Certainly if it was over half it wasn't over by much!