Duplicate images of books & images of books in other languages

Hi,

Has anyone else found it difficult, in some cases, to try to find an image of the book you have in hand? I was trying to match a copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson to the images on LibraryThing. There were more than 2,000 images, a lot of them duplicates of each other (at least 10 duplicate stock images of one specific book) and a lot of images of the book in other languages. Especially when dealing with older or rarer books, I can understand wanting to get the exact image of your book online. However, I question the need for so many of the same stock images. Also, since La isla del tresoro (for example) is not the same title (yes, it is the same work) as Treasure Island, perhaps the images could be tied to that title only. Anything to weed out some of the excess.

There would have to be changes made at LibraryThing as well as a team to do the work. Is there a need and a willingness to do it? I have a lot of spare time right now so I would be in.

Susan

>1 dewasus1: I think this was discussed previously, but sort of collapsed because of inability to reach consensus what constitutes the same cover/image in all but the most obvious examples. Also, this is only an issue with the most popular books with thousands of entrances, which I guess makes it not a particular priority to spend developer time on to do the necessary coding.

I agree in those cases 'change cover' page is basically un-navigable, and I'm pretty sure many of duplicate uploads are due to the fact that it takes too long and is too cumbersome to check all those already uploaded. I once proposed that for those with 100+ images there should be a way to group all similar ones so that you initially see a few dozen at most, you'd pick one corresponding to yours, which would then open all those grouped there to chose one.

>2 SandraArdnas: It should be possible to automate the matching on pictorial covers using something like a facial recognition algorithm. I mean, how does F***book automatically tag photos (are they still doing that)? Plain bindings, on the other hand will be a problem although they could be grouped by colour.

I suspect this would have to wait until we get a proper edition layer. Then same cover but different language could be grouped...

I had all the fun of searching through covers for a load of PD titles earlier this year to find something that would look good in greyscale on an eInk device. This very quickly drove me potty. A lot of the time, I ended up editing a cover I liked to remove publication identifiers or took an image from elsewhere and added text.

When it comes to books 'in other languages', please remember that there are many multilingual members of LT, so if covers were to be sorted by language, all covers would still have to be available on all sites.

Books in other alphabets often include the English title in their title.

Part of the problem may be that people have uploaded "improved" cover images over the years with higher resolution. However, the old ones can't be thrown away because people are still using them.

>Hi, MarthaJeanne,

I would be interested in hearing more about what you are referencing. You speak about the impact on multilingual users to a (sadly) unilingual individual. What would be the issues involved in removing covers of other language editions of a book on that specific record (bearing in mind that this has nothing to do with the language of cataloguing)? I visualize Treasure Island coming with one set of covers, La isla del tresoro coming with another set, and so on. In this case, no covers would be eliminated; it is just that a more targeted set would come, based either on the title or the language of the publication.

There were lengthy discussions about making cover selection for books with many covers easier a long time ago. Some issues:

* No covers that are in-use should ever be deleted - for some people having their exact cover, with scuffs and scratches and used-bookstore pricetags, is critical.

* Different people have very different ideas about what constitutes the "same" cover. (It did not help that Tim used "same" rather than "similar" language in some discussions of potential features to deal with this.

* Different people had different ideas about how to handle collapsing of "same" / "similar" covers and how to make different covers within a stack accessible.

The most "official" version of the thread I could find, which suffers a bit from some of the example images Tim uses no longer being good links, is at https://www.librarything.com/topic/174161 .

>1 dewasus1:
This may or may not be directly helpful.

I sometimes find it easier to find my exact cover by googling. I click it to my desktop and upload. Of course- that contributes to multiple covers - if there are already several- but I have found it to be more accurate than many of the options already available.

Lastly, and only when I feel like taking more time- I just screenshot my book with my phone and send it to my desktop for uploading to LT.